Immediate Feedback for Introductory Computer Programming Courses

Learning to program occurs as the student makes small changes to her program and checks its outcome. Providing feedback during this process is critical. Did the change help the student towards a correct solution? Currently, an instructor sets a programming problem for the student to solve and then, most of the feedback is provided after the student turns in the work for grading. This limits the amount of feedback a student receives to at most once a week; and more importantly, there is no feedback during the hands on process of writing the computer program. The course redesign is to incorporate an online software tool for programming assignments that can provide students with feedback as they incrementally develop their answers.