The purpose of this paper is to present a new software tool that has been developed, the purpose of which is to help novices learn programming. The tool supports what is know as the “completion” method of learning to program.

It begins by discussing the difficulties that students face when learning to program and the use of part-complete solutions as a teaching and learning method. CORT has been developed to support this use of part-complete solutions and its features are outlined. When used by a student, a part-complete solution to a given programming problem is displayed in one window and possible lines of code that can be used to complete the solution are displayed within another window. The lines can easily be moved between the windows in order to complete the solution, the solution then being transferred to the target programming environment for testing purposes.

Preliminary feedback from students indicates that CORT is easy to use and perceived to be helping them in their learning of programming. Three different methods of using CORT have been identified and these will be the subject of future research.