How to make a Cobol course a course in both organization and logic

Programming courses typically concentrate on encouraging ingenuity in solving programming assignments, leaving it to the student to lay out the preliminary plans, writing the program code and, of course, producing some output. Such planning tasks are frequently ignored even by the most talented programmer, especially if they are in a hurry to start coding. In this article, I advocate and lay out a set of detailed steps to enhance organizational skills, planning, and logic. Emphasis is placed on using the eventual output as a guide to what must come earlier. A series of deliverables, such as a spreadsheet to help foreshadow the output, are utilized to achieve this end.