Fundamentals of Computer Science I

Twelve weeks, thirty six sessions, and three things you can point at when you are done: a site you built and published, a program you wrote that does real work, and a database you installed, filled and queried yourself.

CS100 picks up where ITP000's web block stops. The first three weeks take the HTML and CSS you already write to intermediate depth. On day one you learn the terminal and git and publish your page to GitHub Pages, and from then on everything you make is published, not just built. Then semantic structure, forms and accessibility, so a page makes sense to a person and to a screen reader; selectors, the cascade and specificity, so you style a page instead of fighting it; the box model and flexbox; mobile-first responsive layout, so what you make works on the phone in your pocket; and positioning, so you can reason about what sits in front of what.

The next six weeks are programming, with Python and from zero. Variables and types, conditionals and loops, functions and how to break a problem into them, then the data structures real programs are built from: lists, strings, dictionaries, sets and nested data. You learn to trace a program by hand before you run it, and to read an error message and go straight to the line that caused it. The block closes with two sessions of cybersecurity in Python: hashing, and why a site never stores your password; encrypting and decrypting with a symmetric key, and what public-key cryptography adds; what HTTPS is actually doing; and a brute-force loop, so you understand the attacker's baseline and what makes it slow.

Weeks ten and eleven are MySQL and data. You install MySQL on your own laptop and run it yourself: create databases and tables on the command line, insert, update, delete and query them, and administer the same server in DBeaver. Then you connect to it from Python, load a CSV into it, and do a first data analysis with SQL aggregates and the Python standard library, summarising a dataset into a handful of numbers a stranger would trust.

Your review lens starts in week four and runs through all of it. An agent writes faster than any of us and never gets tired, so most code is written by one now. Being able to write it yourself, read it, trace it and say why it is wrong is the part that stays yours.

The last week is careers in computer science, where the field becomes a set of roles and you place yourself on the ladder, and then the showcase. The capstone has no week of its own: it rides the Friday studios of the last four weeks. A Python program you wrote loads a data file into MySQL, queries it, and writes a web page: styled, responsive, published to a live address, and presented to the room. Python is taught from zero. HTML and CSS are not: CS100 assumes ITP000 or an equivalent background. If you already write HTML and CSS and have published a page, register and we will confirm with you; if you have never built a page, the ITP000 + CS100 bundle is the way in.

The October 2026 cohort runs Tue 20 October 2026 to Fri 15 January 2027: 36 sessions across 12 teaching weeks, with a one-week break over New Year. CS100 is what CS200 assumes from its first week, so this is the level that makes the next one make sense.