How the course works

Course structure and assessment

The course is designed to last for two weeks, but you’re welcome to take longer if needed. The course is not facilitated, but is designed to support peer learning through online discussions.

Here’s an overview of the course structure:

• Each week is divided into manageable activities.
• Throughout each activity, you’ll find quizzes and discussions to reinforce and support your learning.
• The course culminates in a graded assignment. You can attempt this assignment as many times as necessary to achieve a passing score of 70% or higher and earn your “Certificate of Achievement”.

This course is part of the Click Start collection of short courses provided by the University of Leeds. Click Start is a nationwide training programme developed by the Institute of Coding (IoC), supported by a consortium of industry leaders, educators, and outreach providers, and funded by Nominet. Click Start aims to diversify the tech industry and address the UK’s digital skills gap.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Describe examples of modern IDEs.
• Explain why programmers use IDEs.
• Summarise what an IDE can do.
• Compare and contrast different IDEs for different tasks.
• Explain why programmers develop tests for their code.
• Explain how to use VSCode to open and edit files.
• Explain how to use VSCode’s debugging tools to fix a piece of Python code.

Thinking about your motivations

Thinking about your motivations may help you identify what you most want to get out of this course. 

Please answer this short course introduction survey about your current experience, knowledge and interests related to the topics covered in this course. The survey will take less than 5 minutes to complete.

Your response will also help us to gain valuable insights directly from learners. We use these insights to help us understand a little more about our learners and what you want from the course. This helps us create a more effective and enriching learning experience. There are a couple more (even shorter) surveys in the course too.

Note: this optional survey does not affect your completion of the course. Further detail on how we (University of Leeds) use survey responses is included at the start of the survey and in this Privacy Notice.