Many students find great difficulty with the learning of programming. This paper discusses some of those difficulties and ways in which the cognitive load that students experience can be reduced. One way of reducing the load is to make use of the cloze method that is used in English comprehension testing. When used with the learning of programming, the cloze method requires students to fill-in and complete a part-complete solution to a programming problem that has been given. A code restructuring tool, CORT, has been built by the author to support this method and utilised by students in an introductory programming course. Initial results suggest that students were encouraged and motivated whilst using CORT and that the time taken to complete problems and the help required were less than for students who did not use the tool.
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