CSOCSC Foundation Year Computer Science
International Foundation Programme
Reading, like many teaching institutions has a set of entry requirements for its undergraduate degree programmes, typically for UK students these are ‘A’ levels or HND equivalents. For overseas students there are a number of qualifications that are also recognised but many other qualifications are not recognised (I think this was from a list maintained by what was at the time known as the Higher Education Funding Council for England - HEFCE?). Anyway, for those students who didn’t have suitable pre-conditions the university ran a one year foundation programme which gave students a Diploma which equated to 3 ‘A’ levels.
One of the modules for this Foundation Year programme was in Computer Science, and I was engaged to teach this module in 2002. It was intended to just provide a basic familiarity with computing topics and to teach the rudiments of programming using Pascal (specifically Turbo Pascal on Windows PCs).
I enjoyed teaching this - unsurprisingly the students came from a very range of backgrounds and countries, and had a very range of pre-existing skills, so it was something of challenge to herd them all in the same direction and to the appropriate level of achievement!