An automatic system providing constructive feedback for early programming courses

A system for constructive feedback for beginner programmers was developed which, based on an evaluation of various feedback criteria, analyses code submitted by learners and provides them with unevaluated feedback with suggestions for improvement for these submissions. Several different components were developed for this purpose, which provide feedback in different areas. For example, the quality of tests was analysed, as well as syntactic and semantic correctness. Various existing tools were used for this purpose, which were subsequently adapted to the use case and provided with predefined configurations. These configurations generally offer good default values with which very good feedback can already be created. In many cases, however, it is possible to deviate from this predefined configuration and customise it for specific tasks. Furthermore, a server and a plugin for IntelliJ were developed, with which learners can easily access the functionality from their development environment. The system was tested and analysed in several different scenarios. The use of the system has statistically significantly increased the quality awareness of learners.