Small Basic

Microsoft Small Basic is a free, beginner-friendly programming language and environment from Microsoft. With a deliberately small set of keywords and a simple editor that offers helpful auto-completion, it is designed to make a student’s first steps into text-based programming as gentle as possible.

Its built-in Turtle graphics library is a popular way to introduce programming concepts, and completed programs can later be “graduated” to Visual Basic. Small Basic works well as a stepping stone from Scratch towards languages such as Python or Visual Basic at KS3 and GCSE.