Welcome to University of Helsinki’s massive open online course (MOOC) on object-oriented programming!

During this course you will learn all the basics of computer programming, algorithms and object-oriented programming using the Java programming language. The course includes comprehensive course materials and plenty of programming exercises, each tested using our automatic testing service Test My Code.

Anyone can join - no previous programming knowledge is required.

Unlike many programming courses found online, ours is completely unabridged: the course’s scope and material are identical to our own CS1 programming courses. This first part consists of 6 sets of tasks, corresponding to the 6 weeks of effort in the course taught at our department.

This is the first course in our computer science learning track and we use industry strength tools from day one. Therefore the course is about programming in a real integrated development environment (IDE) and not in the browser or an educational IDE.

After installing the required tools, you are ready start learning Java and programming.

Help with the exercises

• Support channel
  • Primary support channel is through chatroom: #mooc.fi:matrix.org
  • Also accessable through IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
  • Channel #mooc.fi @IRCnet

Other business and bug reports

• Send mail to mooc@cs.helsinki.fi
  • The email address is intended for administrative use only. For assistance with exercises see above.

What next?

Done already? If you would like to continue your journey to mastery of Java, why not try the second part of this course?

The second part provides six more weeks of material and exercises and introduces more advanced concepts such as graphical interfaces.

About the organizing institution

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, has been chosen by the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council as a Centre of Excellence in Finnish University Education for 2007-2009 and 2010-2012. Teachers at the department have also been awarded the most prestigious teacher awards (Magister Bonus prize in 2006 and 2011, and Eino Kaila prize in 2009). The latest turn in the long-term development of education at the department is the RAGE (Agile education research) research group, exploring and developing education with light and highly reactive educational structures, aiming to provide a massive increase in interaction between students and teachers.

The Linkki Centre organizes outreach activities in computer science under the Science Education Centre LUMA. Activities organized by the centre include clubs and camps organized for children and youth, coaching for competitive programming contests (such as the International Olympiad in Informatics) and courses for inservice teachers.

The MOOC courses are organized by the Department of Computer Science and the Linkki Centre operating at the department; the RAGE research group is responsible for teaching and course arrangements. The Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation has funded some parts of the operation.