Ousbasic—A structured basic-like language for teaching computing

Abstract

Open University students learn on their own with little or no tutorial help. They are limited to a relatively small amount of terminal access to a computer. For use with a new Introductory course in Computing, the Open University has designed a new programming language to cope with this special situation. The new language supports a variety of teaching objectives. This paper informally describes the design of the language. The language incorporates features which will not normally be taught to novice programmers but which enable the Open University to write robust test-bed software for students to interact with.