Congratulations on obtaining your place to study at Canterbury Christ Church University. We look forward to seeing you in September. I am sure it will be an exciting time as you prepare to come to University and you may have questions that you would like answering.
Tim Jackson
Course Director
Academic Calendar: Semesters
View key dates for this Academic Calendar for 2024-25 including when teaching starts and finishes and when you break for holidays.
Please read the information provided and if you still have questions, do contact us. You may wish to keep track of what we are doing in the Department by following us on our Faculty Instagram (the ETD section in particular!) and X!
I hope this will be the start of a long relationship with the University and that it will be a truly beneficial experience.
Your foundation year is aimed to help you move towards being able to study in a degree course and takes place over the entirety of the academic year. The academic year will be split into two semesters – one running from September to January and a second one from late January to May.
Each semester you will study three different modules covering different areas of the foundation year. You will be learning skills needed to study at degree level while you are studying the different areas. You will study alongside students who are aiming to study different degree subjects on successful completion of the foundation year.
The first semester will involve you studying some simple computer programming, looking at the role of computers in society - their positive and negative effects, and working with some different application software so you can manipulate different computer media such as pictures and words while learning terms and concepts in computing.
In the second semester you will improve your mathematics, learn about computer hardware - so you understand how computers are built and operate, and undertake a small computer software development project by yourself. Over the year you’ll learn how to record your work in a logbook, so that you can provide evidence of your progress and improve your writing skills in essays and presentations.
You will be assessed by assignment work, presentation and some tests that happen in the classroom. These will be related to tasks you have done and the type of task that you would undertake in industry. There may also be an opportunity to undertake internationally recognised qualifications in Microsoft applications.
You will need to attend University on at least three days a week. Classes will be on three different days and the timetable will be given to you when it is finalised over the summer. There may be times when you need to come in on other days to complete work by yourself or with others. On successful completion of the foundation year, you will be eligible to move into year 1 of the BEng (Hons) Software Engineering course of study. There you will start to develop specialist knowledge and skills that will feed through the three years of the degree course.
There is no particular work we would like you to do before you arrive. If you would like to undertake a task and have your own computer then we would suggest the following website would be a good starting point to understand how computer programming works, if this is something you have not done before. You can download the software for free and make use of the tutorials to create simple apps for Android phones here.
You will need a Google account to use this, and it may be worth creating a new one should you wish to use this. Under the ‘Resources’ menu option there are a number of tutorials, at different levels from Basic to Advanced. Try a few basic tutorials before you look at Intermediate or Advanced ones. This will help you learn how the tutorials guide you as well as using the App Inventor Interface before you try more complex tasks.
We recommend you don’t buy any particular software as much of the software you will need over your degree will be available to you for free or at a much-reduced price once you start. You will find having your own computer exceedingly useful. This will help you to do your assessments in your own time and attend any classes that are online. If you are looking to buy a computer then we would suggest that you look at reviews of different computers online as we find it hard to recommend a particular product. As a computing student you will find that you will need a computer with an above minimum specification for the chosen operating system (look at what is required for Windows 11). We would suggest that you look at the recommended specification for Visual Studio Professional as an absolute minimum specification. Higher specifications will help safeguard you against future increases in minimum requirements, and higher processor speeds will help run multiple courses at once. For hard disk space higher is required to fit on other software as well, and a minimum suggested size would be 256GB – particularly important if you plan to use solid state drives. You should note that we use the Windows environment predominantly in the Department of Computing, so if you buy an Apple system then it would benefit from being dual boot Windows and MacOS. If you buy a Linux only system then you may find you will need to install a Windows operating system at a later date, and this is generally more expensive than buying a computer with Windows already installed on it. You may find that if you are doing a lot of studying on your computer, having a web-cam, headphones and possibly even a second monitor really useful. If you use a laptop, do consider a mouse and full-size keyboard may help. We have found that students who are trying to study at home appreciate having a good, stable internet connection, and you want to note that changing provider at the moment is taking longer than it has done previously.
Your welcome and induction will be w/c 16 September 2024 - we look forward to meeting you then.
There is no particular reading we want you to do before you arrive, but it may be worth looking at the Technology pages of online news sources to see the common areas that are being talked about in the field of computing and business.
We suggest the following sites:
They are worth looking at once or twice a week, if you are not accustomed to reading current affairs articles. You can often find background information to the stories by searching Wikipedia which may help your understanding of the topic.
International students: don't miss out! Make sure you register for our international student success programme which provides practical advice on preparing to live and study in the UK.
If you have any queries, please feel to contact the Computing Course Team