Foundations of Computing and Software Engineering
How computers work and how software is built — the foundations every developer needs
5.0(3 ratings) Updated October 2026 English 20 students
What you'll learn
- - Explain how a computer works, from input to output
- - Tell hardware and software apart, and describe what the CPU, RAM and storage do
- - Understand why computers store everything as 0s and 1s, and how data is measured
- - Describe how the operating system and applications work together
- - Explain how the internet delivers a website to your screen
- - Describe the six steps of the software development life cycle
Course content
8 sections · 57 lectures · 1h 3m total length
›Introduction to computing6 lectures
- Computing and the internet
- Hardware, software, and what's inside a computer
- Everything is 0s and 1s
- Layers — from hardware to you
- How the internet connects us
- Quick check — introduction to computing
›Software engineering4 lectures
- Software engineering is more than coding
- Recap — the software development life cycle
- What is a stack? And the famous stacks you'll hear about
- Popular technologies in each layer
›Careers in tech10 lectures · 1h 3m
- The Career Map
- Build — the engineers who write the code
- Design and product — deciding what to build
- Data and AI — turning data into intelligence
- Cloud and infrastructure — keeping it running
- Security — protecting people and data
- Quality, leadership and business
- Tech + your passion = your future
- How to start on any path
- Career path and Stack1h 3m
›The web stack and your developer environment6 lectures
- The web stack you'll learn
- Your developer toolkit
- Set up, step by step
- Git and GitHub — saving and sharing your code
- Your first web page
- If something doesn't work
›HTML: headings, paragraphs and images5 lectures
- How an HTML page is built
- Headings, from h1 to h6
- Paragraphs
- Images
- Putting it together — build a page
›HTML continues8 lectures
- Semantic HTML — tags with meaning
- Div and span — the general-purpose containers
- Lists
- Links
- More useful tags — quotes, figures, lines and comments
- Tables
- Putting it together — a semantic page
- Quick check — HTML continues
›Introduction to CSS12 lectures
- What CSS is, and how to add it
- Selectors — choosing what to style
- Colours
- Fonts and text
- The cascade, and testing in DevTools
- Quick check — introduction to CSS
- The box model
- Sizes and units
- Flexbox basics
- Flexbox in practice — a navbar and cards
- Making it work on phones
- Quick check — CSS continues
›Styling text: fonts and typography6 lectures
- Font families and font stacks
- Using Google Fonts
- Font Size and Units
- Weight, style and spacing
- Alignment, transforms and decoration
- Quick check — styling text
Requirements
- - A phone, tablet or computer to read the lessons
- - No coding experience needed
Description
Learn how software is really made, starting from zero. This course explains how computers work — input and output, hardware and software, binary, operating systems and the internet — and how software engineers turn ideas into products using the software development life cycle.
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