A Program Design Tool to Help Novices Learn Programming

The learning of software development is difficult for many students. Often students start writing programming code as soon as they receive a problem statement without paying sufficient attention to program design. One of the most common ways to design the logic of a program is to use pseudocode, and yet many students do not like to do this. Reasons for this include: it is another language to learn; they do not think that they are actually programming; they cannot test their designs as the designs are not executable; there is not a rigid syntax and so students are unsure whether their pseudocode meets an instructor's expectations.