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As quality problems plague the modern society's software infrastructure, a fundamental learning objective of computing education has become developing students' attitudes, knowledge, and practices centered around software quality. Teaching software quality and its disciplined practices has thus far been limited to more advanced courses, due to the prevailing assumptions about the introductory learner's unpreparedness for the topic and potential negative impacts on learner motivation. In this paper, we present empirical evidence that starkly contradicts the established conventional belief. Specifically, by exploring how novice programmers learn to refactor code duplication with and without automated tools, we found strong evidence that novices grasp the importance of code quality and its improvement. This empirical evidence motivated us, in retrospect, to closely examine the design of our online interactive tutorial, a platform that drove our experimental user study. We identify and discuss the tutorial's key design principles and affirm their efficacy based on the observed learning experiences. The obtained insights can inform curricular interventions that introduce introductory students to code quality and its disciplined improvement practices.