Java and Python, taught side by side, from your first line of code. No prior programming knowledge assumed — this subject is designed for people who have never written a program.
Weeks 2, 3 and 5 deliver the three concepts every general-purpose program is built from. Add input and output and you can write any program at all. Everything from Week 6 adds no fourth idea — it is about keeping those three manageable as programs grow.
State, decision and iteration — plus the input and output that connect a program to the world. This is SLO1, and it is the whole foundation.
No new primitives — just structure. Classes, methods, lists, files and inheritance are all ways of keeping state, decision and iteration under control at scale.
Python shows you an idea with the least ceremony. Java shows you what that ceremony buys — types checked before the program runs, and errors caught at compile time rather than in front of a user. Seeing the same concept in both is the fastest way to tell a language feature apart from a programming idea.
Writing code is 55% of the marks. Explaining and reasoning about code is 45%. Students who treat this as a subject about typing code are consistently surprised by the other half.
Pass mark is 50% overall. All assessments are individual. Canvas → Assignments is authoritative for tasks and deadlines.
Exercises most weeks, marked automatically. Unlimited attempts — attempt 1 and attempt 101 score the same — but you must pass every test case in an exercise to get its marks. Due 11:55pm the Monday of the following week.
Four in-person orals, about three minutes each, run during lab classes. You are given a short piece of code and asked about it. The questions are released beforehand.
One program of roughly 500 lines, built progressively across the session. The only assessment touching all five SLOs, and the only one where you design the structure yourself.
Take-home, open-book, one day. Tests understanding and application, not recall.
Stage 1 in Week 4 (5%) · Stage 2 in Week 7 (5%) · Stage 3 in Week 11 (7%) · Stage 4 in Week 12 (8%). Timetabling permitting — confirm on Canvas.
Challenging free-form problems, sometimes requiring research beyond the subject. Worth 0% by itself, but can substitute for the lab assessments. Worth considering if the weekly exercises feel easy.
All submitted code is analysed by similarity tools that examine how code works, not how it looks — renaming variables does not help. Researching a concept or an error message is encouraged and expected. Submitting code you cannot explain is not, and four times this session you will be asked to explain code out loud, in person. Reported cases go to a committee, not to teaching staff, and can take months to resolve. Ask for help early instead.
There is no lab in Week 1 — lab classes start in Week 2. Weekly topics follow the subject outline; exact assessment scheduling is confirmed on Canvas.
Weekly topics come from the subject outline. Lab arrangements, session dates and the exact scheduling of assessments may be adjusted to suit our situation here — where anything differs, announcements and Canvas are authoritative.
All subject material is on Ed. Work through the Lessons page top to bottom each week — lectures, readings and coding exercises are all there, and nothing needs installing: Ed gives you Java and Python in the browser.
What programming is, your first Java and Python programs, variables and types, and how to read an error message when it all goes wrong.
Weeks 2–3Booleans and conditionals, switch and match, every kind of loop in both languages, then arrays, lists, dicts, sets and tuples — and how Java bundles data before it has objects.
Week 4Breaking a program into methods and functions, how arguments are passed in Java and Python, what a call does on the stack and the heap, and Java records for plain old data.
Week 5The principles of OOP, writing your own classes in Java and Python, static members, constructors and this, objects in memory, enums, and Java's newer switch.
▶A real JVM and real CPython, running in your browser. Write a program, feed it input, run it. Nothing to install, nothing submitted — break things freely.
▶Lectures, readings and coding exercises. Run the code in the readings, change things, break things — refreshing restores the original, so you cannot damage anything.
?Search first. Then a new thread, short descriptive title, public unless genuinely sensitive, and no code in the post. Not monitored over the weekend — get stuck on Friday, not Sunday night.
You do not need it, but if you want to work offline: OpenJDK (the subject uses 23; anything after 14 works), Python 3 (Ed runs 3.12.7), and VS Code handles both.
Flipped lectures → readings with runnable examples → practice exercises → a 1.5 hour lab weekly from Week 2 → assessed exercises, plus weekly drop-in sessions. The step people skip: when you get stuck, go back and review that specific topic, then try again.