International Foundation Certificate in Computing

The course covers the key aspects of writing an essay. These include features of academic style, the planning process, structuring an argument, summarising, paraphrasing techniques, referencing, avoiding plagiarism, and drafting and editing. Emphasis is given to the logic underlying Western academic writing conventions, rather than simply looking at the procedural aspects. This is supported by work on the main areas of English grammar, with a particular focus on improving grammatical range and accuracy in students’ writing.

Reading skills are also developed. Textual analysis enables students to learn about cohesion, extend their vocabulary, read for gist and specific information, infer meaning, as well as develop summary skills. The texts generally focus on a background to Western thought and culture, taking into account ancient Greeks and Romans, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the influence of modernity, feminism and Marxism. There is an emphasis on how to use reading in writing: to learn from other writers’ style and using their points as evidence for students’ arguments.

Please Note: English Language Development modules are only available for students whose first language is not English.

To enhance listening skills, the course makes use of a wide range of texts, drawing firstly on commercially produced EAP materials to help students acquire the skills of listening for gist and specific information and taking useful notes. Later, the course moves on recordings from Goldsmiths library as well as BBC radio shows. Students are exposed to a range of challenging and interesting recordings related to the arts, current affairs, media, education and aspects of British culture. Many of the recordings are relevant to subjects studied at Goldsmiths, for example race and ethnicity, representation, identity and culture. Where possible, the recordings are exploited for vocabulary development.

To develop speaking skills, students will have to research and give seminar presentations and lead the class through discussion of their chosen topic. They will receive input on effective seminar techniques and functional language. There is also ongoing feedback on their presentations.

In this module, you'll focus on research methodologies. You'll be given a comprehensive overview of some of the main ways that knowledge is generated within university contexts. This includes:

• Defining research questions
• Qualitative and quantitative approaches
• Research design
• Research ethics
• Good questionnaire design
• Conducting surveys, using software where appropriate
• Conducting structured and semi-structured interviews; 
• Ethnographic approaches
• Coding data
• Drawing conclusions
• Recognising limitations

You'll collaborate in small groups (3-4 students) over the academic year to design and conduct your own research project. You'll be supported and closely supervised by your module convenor, and can relate to, and extend, IFC students’ pathway studies or learning from Music foundation studies. As the projects develop, the module adopts more of a workshop approach, with some group tutorials offered. 

As well as the content focus on research, you'll explore ‘soft’ skills such as: recognising individuals’ value to a team effort, conflict resolution, pooling resources, time management, poster design, confidence building, presentation skills and self-reflection.

This module aims to provide basic problem-solving strategies relevant to compute programming, by controlling the definition and use of algorithms to control data and achieve a task. This module is designed to be taught concurrently with the Foundations of Computer Programming module to students with little or no experience with computer programming. It complements the bottom-up tendency of the syntax based Programming module by providing a top-down view of programming.

It is expected that this will increase students interest in and understanding of algorithms, and clarity and efficiency when programming, which are fundamental when pursuing a career in Computing.

This module aims to give students a basic understanding of computer programming. On completion, students should have the necessary skills to be able to design, build and test a small system in a high-level language that supports object-oriented programming (eg. Python).