As AI-powered resources become increasingly accessible to students, CS1 instructors are seeking strategies to cultivate independent thinking skills and academic integrity. Regardless of the level of a student’s AI usage, the key to effective learning lies in the process undertaken to produce code or arrive at conclusions. Consequently, there is a need for tools that can reveal the steps students take to complete their work and provide insights into their working process.

This tutorial will introduce Process Feedback, a new and free online compiler designed to show students’ coding processes. By visualizing their working process, instructors and students can better understand the reasons behind their struggles or successes with coding tasks.

When students code in the compiler, they can view their process through various quantitative summaries and visualizations, including total time taken to complete the task, a playback of the entire coding journey, breaks taken during coding, typing fluency, copy-paste events, time spent on each code block, code execution history, and AI usage history. The online platform is designed to encourage students to engage in reflection and self-directed learning. This tutorial will also explore strategies and best practices for integrating such tools into classrooms and will conclude with an examination of case studies and research findings to demonstrate how implementing process-oriented tools can enhance learning outcomes.