Jumpstart Workshops

For the 2025-26 academic year, we have organised a series of 3 optional preparatory workshops designed to help incoming students build confidence and foundational knowledge for programming. These workshops cover essential skills like working with different media types, navigating the command line, and understanding how computers work under the hood.

Each workshop includes a short guided lecture, a hands-on creative activity, supporting notes and optional readings. No prior experience is necessary. To take part, you will need a laptop (rather than a phone or an iPad*) and an internet connection.

These workshops will run online before the start of term, and be hosted by CCI technical and teaching staff, and a team of student helpers. Each workshop is repeated twice, and students are welcome to attend as many or as few workshops as they would like.

Please register for the workshops you plan to attend so we can get an idea of numbers!

01: File Systems and the Command Line

This workshop will cover fundamental parts of interacting with a computer filesystem, and show you how to find hidden information about files. Through learning about the command line and the file browser, you’ll get to see a different side to your computer.

02: Image, Sound and Video

We'll look at different kinds of digital media files on computers, learn how they are made (and what they're made of!), and how to find them both locally on computers and online.

03: Make a Website

In the final workshop of the series, we will explore how to use filepaths, text editors and media types to make small websites from scratch, and host them online.

FAQ

I only have a phone or an iPad/tablet -- can I still attend? You are welcome to join, but there will be some activities that won't be possible to take part in without a full computer. If you have questions about this, please contact Agnes on a.cameron@arts.ac.uk and we can try and arrange something.

Will the workshops be the same in both weeks? Yes -- we're running them twice so as many people as possible can attend around working commitments, and different timezones.

How will this help me on my course? This course was written by teaching and technical staff to address some of the most common problems encountered by incoming students across all of our courses. These workshops will set you up with the foundational skills that will then be built on once you commence your studies.

What programming languages do these workshops cover? The workshops are designed to teach general skills rather than specific languages, apart from the final workshop, which uses a small amount of HTML to make a website.

Can I attend the same workshop in both weeks? Yes, if you want to! You are welcome to attend as many as you like.

Do I need to go to them in the right order? What if I can only attend one or two? Each workshop is designed to teach useful skills by itself. While we think people will get the most out of these workshops by attending in order, it's fine to attend whichever you are able to!

Will you run these in person after term starts? We're not sure yet -- it depends on attendance. If not, we also run a program of technical skills workshops in the department that might be of interest.

I'm not finished registration yet / not sure if I'm going to attend. Can I still come? Yes! We do not require students to be fully registered to attend this course.

I can't attend any of the workshops but I'm still interested in the material The workshops are fully written out as pages on the CCI wiki, and are linked above. Each one should have enough information to explore the activities, and if you run into issues, chat to technicians Mayra or Agnes after term starts.