A user-friendly software environment for the novice programmer

SOLO, a nonnumerical programming language, was developed at The Open University in the U.K. to support a course on Cognitive Psychology. It was designed to acquaint students as painlessly as possible with the computing fundamentals necessary both to grasp AI principles as applied in Cognitive Psychology and to actually initiate fairly sophisticated exercises on their own. The language has been used successfully by more than 2500 social science students.