Teaching programming concepts using an icon-based software design tool

The authors have developed a Windows-based iconic detailed design tool named which allows the user to design a program with icons representing all the major procedural and object-oriented programming constructs and data structures within a syntax-directed environment. The user can then generate syntactically correct code for any one of several text-based languages. This tool was used successfully for several years in an academic environment, and multimedia-based teaching materials were developed in conjunction with a National Science Foundation grant.