This course introduces freshmen with no prior programming experience to procedural programming and the fundamentals of object-oriented design using Java. Students write, compile, and debug their own programs from the first week, progressing from basic control structures and methods through arrays, string processing, and simple custom classes. In the second half of the course, students extend a base class in a guided design, then apply what they have learned to build a small JavaFX desktop application backed by a PostgreSQL database. Throughout the course, students learn to use an approved AI coding assistant as a study and productivity tool through a companion prompt-engineering guidebook, while every exam includes an unaided, handwritten component so that AI use never substitutes for a student’s own understanding. This course establishes the procedural and basic object-oriented foundation required for the Object-Oriented Programming course offered in Spring 2027.
- Teacher: Nurlan Shaidullaev