The first five chapters teach the various instructions to control the drawing robot. The instructions are lined up one after another, with neither branches nor loops. The clipboard is used to avoid typing the same instructions over again. The result of these programs are necessarily quite simple drawings.

The repeat loops (not standard in Java, C++ and C#) allow the repetition of a bloc of instructions a certain number of times, without using a variable. With this loop structure the students can draw circles and other patterns that repeat themselves.

With functions you can make the structure of the program more explicit, and they make it much easier to program drawings with patterns that repeat themselves with small differences.

With a function that gets one parameter that will be stored in a variable, you can easily draw similar objects of different sizes. This is also a convenient way to introduce variables in a specific context, without teaching the general concept of variables, which is quite difficult to understand for students of that age.

In CeeBot-3 for loops are the second context in which the students will use variables. The five programming concepts listed above allow the students to program complex drawings and animations. It is a deliberate choice to teach as few concepts as possible, ensuring that these concepts will be well mastered. However, for more advanced students, all the instructions of a complete object oriented programming language (conditional loops and branches, several variable types, class definitions, etc.) are available and documented.