The material in semester one focuses on core understanding and core competence, with topics including programming fundamentals, database systems, algorithms and data structures and software engineering.

Compulsory modules

This module aims to

  • Introduce fundamental programming concepts, tools, and techniques that can be used and developed by subsequent modules.
  • Equip students to develop independent postgraduate study skills in computer science, focusing on data description, summary and visualisation.
  • Encourage students to develop a responsible attitude towards collaborative learning and authentic assessment.

The aims of this module are to:

  • Develop students' ability to reason about data
  • Engage in the full lifecycle of a database including abstract modelling, concrete realisation, CRUD interaction, and privilege allocation.

The aims of this module are to:

  • Enable students to reason about computational complexity in the context any given computational problem.
  • Equip students to interact with the libraries of a modern programming language, in order to harness appropriate algorithms and data structures in the solution of a computational problem.
  • Develop students' ability to read and construct pseudo code.

The aims of this module are to:

  • Introduce the tools, techniques, terminology and objectives of modern software engineering practice.
  • Compare and contrast the significant characteristics and features of modern software engineering paradigms.
  • Provide an environment for students to collaborate on a software engineering development.