Students studying computer science tend be ineffective planners who don't know the best practices for completing coding assignments and projects in terms of risk assessment/identification, help-seeking, and time management, which results in poor habits and inefficient learning. Cardinal seeks to help students improve those skills through planning scaffolds. The current scaffold focuses on helping students create better initial plans by scaffolding them in their understanding of the assignment to get students to 1. Understand the high-level goal nad the concepts required to reach that goal and 2. Reflecting on what they know and still need to learn to complete this assignment. The next steps for Cardinal are to continue iterating on the scaffold to help students decompose their tasks, incorporate debugging into the process and getting students to think more about how things can go wrong. The eventual goal is to create an iterative planning tool to get students to iteratively plan as they go through the assignment .