GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems and for performing other numerical experiments. It also provides extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation. Octave is normally used through its interactive command line interface, but it can also be used to write non-interactive programs. The Octave language is quite similar to Matlab so that most programs are easily portable.

Octave is continually being upgraded. The current version 5.1 includes a graphical user interface, support for classdef object-oriented programming, and many new and improved functions. Student projects may also involve developing or upgrading Octave Forge packages, which can be loaded to provide additional specialized functions that supplement those provided in Core Octave.