First approach to the design of a natural pseudo-code language: the case of keywords

pseudo-code is a well-known and widely used tool for beginners in learning programming. It supposes a first approach to a textual programming language avoiding in part the formalities of these, for example, using the mother tongue pseudocode. The intuitive idea is that much of the pseudo-code used today is similar and quite close to a direct translation from high level programming languages. The motivation of this work is to investigate to what extent the pseudo-code fulfills its function of approach to programming. the main objective of pseudo-code is to express the tasks to be carried out by the program. Therefor, to facilitate learning, pseudo-code's constructions should be easy to understand. This work focuses on keywords commonly used for basic instructions and execution flow control. It consists of a survey of students from different vocational training cycles about these keywords. The initial result seems to show that, in some cases, their responses match the "classic" pseudo-code, but in others they are quite different. However, we believe it is convenient to extend the study to a greater population.