Training Students' Abstraction Skills Around a CAFÉ 2.0
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Shaping first year students' mind to help them master abstraction skills is as crucial as it is challenging. Although abstraction is a key competence in problem-solving (in particular in STEM disciplines), students are often found to rush that process because they find it hard and do not get any direct outcome out of it. They prefer to invest their efforts directly in a concrete ground, rather than using abstraction to create a solution. To overcome that situation, in the context of our CS1 course, we implemented a tool called CAFÉ 2.0. It allows students to actively and regularly practice (thanks to a longitudinal activity) their abstraction skills through a graphical programming methodology. Moreover, further than reviewing students' final implementation, CAFÉ 2.0 produces a personalized feedback on how students modeled their solution, and on how consistent it is with their final code. This paper describes CAFÉ 2.0 in a general setting and also provides a concrete example in our CS1 course context. This paper also assesses students' interaction with CAFÉ 2.0 through perception and participation data. Finally, we explain how CAFÉ 2.0 could extended in another context than a CS1 course.
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