How the programme is structured
The programme runs across 8 levels holding 384 written lessons, each level at 48 lessons · 48 hours. Every level below lists what it covers and what the student walks away having built.
Need the lesson-by-lesson breakdown? Open the full lesson plan — every lesson with its code, type and milestone.
Variables, types, conditionals, loops, lists and functions — paced over 48 one-hour lessons packed with text-based games (Mad Libs, Rock-Paper-Scissors, Magic 8-Ball, Hangman, Text Adventures, Number Guesser), bug-hunt challenges and mini-projects.
🚀 What you build
- 🎮 Mad Libs: Build Your First Word Game — Use variables and strings to make a silly story generator.
- 🎮 Mini-Game: Rock, Paper, Scissors — Combine input, if and random to beat the computer.
- 🧩 Loop Challenges: Patterns & Pictures — Draw triangles, squares and stars in ASCII art.
- 🎮 Game: Magic 8-Ball — A random answer-picker built from a list and random.choice().
- 🎮 Game: Lucky Draw Picker — Spin a hawker-stall menu and pick tonight's eat.
- 🧩 Challenge: List Lab — Find the max, total, count and duplicates in a list — without using max() at first.
- 🎮 Game: Anagram Detective — Sort the letters of two words and check if they match.
- 🎮 Game: Quiz Engine — Part 1 — Build a function that asks a question and checks the answer.
- 🎮 Game: Quiz Engine — Part 2 (Score & Feedback) — Add a running score, encouragement messages and a final report.
- 🧩 Challenge: Functions Decathlon — Ten timed mini-functions to write from scratch in 60 minutes.
- + 14 more projects and challenges in this level
Collections, strings, files, errors and modules — then a practical software toolkit: regular expressions, JSON, and visual programming with Turtle. Forty-eight one-hour lessons that turn code into real programs which read, save and process data, with multi-part games (Wordle-Lite, Tic-Tac-Toe, Turtle Race) along the way.
🚀 What you build
- 🎮 Game: Secret Code Translator — Encode and decode messages with a key-value cipher.
- 🎮 Game: Word Bingo with Sets — Mark called words off a bingo card built from a set.
- 🧩 Challenge: Inventory Inspector — Query a nested data structure five different ways.
- 🎮 Game: Mad Libs 2.0 with f-strings — Rebuild the L1 Mad Libs game with cleaner formatting.
- 🎮 Game: Higher-or-Lower (Cards) — Deal from a shuffled deck and guess.
- 🎮 Game: High-Score Keeper (File-Backed) — Scores survive between runs.
- 🎮 Game: Wordle-Lite — Part 1 (Load Word Bank) — Read 100 5-letter words from a file and pick a secret one.
- 🎮 Game: Wordle-Lite — Part 2 (Feedback Logic) — Right letter right place, right letter wrong place, missing.
- 🎮 Game: Wordle-Lite — Part 3 (Polish & Stats) — Six tries, ASCII colour codes, a final stats line.
- 🧩 Challenge: Error-Proof Calculator — Build a calculator that survives every weird user input you can think of.
- + 10 more projects and challenges in this level
Object-oriented design, generators, recursion, classic algorithms and your own data structures — taught through dungeon heroes, monster classes, fractal art, and a 48-lesson arc that ends with a Dungeon Quest capstone and the PCEP mock exam.
🚀 What you build
- 🎮 Game: Dungeon Hero Class — A Hero with HP, attack and inventory — the L3 mascot is born.
- 🎮 Game: Monster Family Tree — Goblin, Orc and Boss all inherit from Monster.
- 🎮 Game: Monsters with Different Attacks — Each monster overrides .attack() — polymorphism in action.
- 🛠️ Project: Pet Shop Inventory — Class Pet + list of pets + price lookup + total stock value.
- 🧩 Challenge: Score Leaderboards — Comprehensions + sorted + lambda to rank players.
- 🎮 Game: Lazy Enemy Spawner — A generator drips enemies into a battle one at a time.
- 🧩 Challenge: Functional Olympics — Six problems solved with comprehensions, lambda and generators — no loops allowed.
- 🎮 Game: Recursive Art — Trees with Turtle — A self-similar tree that branches forever.
- 🎮 Game: Recursive Art — Koch Snowflake — Add a bump to every line, repeat. A perfect snowflake emerges.
- 🎮 Game: Recursive Art — Sierpinski Triangle — A triangle of triangles of triangles.
- + 2 more projects and challenges in this level
The level that opens job-shaped doors — JSON, CSV, REST APIs, web scraping, SQL & SQLite, pandas, matplotlib, Flask + auth. Forty-eight one-hour lessons, every project rooted in something a junior developer would actually be asked to build.
🚀 What you build
- 🛠️ Project: CSV ↔ JSON Converter — Pick a direction, transform the file, prove the round-trip works.
- 🧩 Challenge: Data Janitor — Take a deliberately broken CSV and ship it clean.
- 🛠️ Project: Trivia Quiz from a Real API — Live questions from Open Trivia DB.
- 🛠️ Project: Weather App for Cities — Pull live forecasts and print a friendly summary.
- 🛠️ Project: Shop Price Tracker — Scrape a price page daily, log changes to a CSV.
- 🛠️ Project: Library Management System — Books, members and loans across three tables.
- 🧩 Challenge: Investigate a Real Dataset — Five questions you must answer from a real CSV.
- 🛠️ Project: Data Story — A 3-Chart Report — Pick a dataset, ask a question, answer it with three charts.
- 🛠️ Capstone: Full-Stack Data Web App — Flask + SQLite + auth + a live dataset — your portfolio's first real project.
Machine learning with scikit-learn, neural networks with Keras, computer vision with OpenCV, NLP, and real apps powered by LLM APIs (Claude and GPT). Forty-eight one-hour lessons, every concept introduced with a plain-English analogy before the library call.
🚀 What you build
- 🛠️ Project: Predict Titanic Survival — Your first complete ML pipeline.
- 🛠️ Project: Property Price Predictor — Real local data; fit, validate, present.
- 🛠️ Project: Handwritten Digit Recogniser (MNIST) — The classic neural-net hello-world.
- 🛠️ Project: Fashion Item Classifier — Train a model on 10 clothing categories.
- 🛠️ Project: Smile Detector App — Smile at the camera; the app responds.
- 🛠️ Project: Cyberbullying Comment Filter — Train a classifier to flag harmful messages.
- 🛠️ Project: Flask + LLM Chat App — Connect a real website to a real language model.
- 🛠️ Capstone: Your AI-Powered Application — Pick a real problem you care about; build the model + the UI.
The level that turns coders into engineers — unittest, pytest, fixtures, mocking, coverage, TDD, integration testing, linting and type checking. Forty-eight one-hour lessons, building real test suites for the games and apps from earlier levels.
🚀 What you build
- 🛠️ Project: Test the L2 Tic-Tac-Toe Engine — A full pytest suite for the game you wrote in Level 2.
- 🛠️ Project: Test the L3 Dungeon Quest — Cover Hero, Monster, Battle and Inventory classes.
- 🧩 Challenge: Find the Hidden Bugs — Five working-but-subtly-broken functions; write tests that catch every bug.
- 🧩 Challenge: Mock Olympics — Four tricky cases where mocks save the day.
- 🛠️ TDD Project Part 1: Library Catalogue — Write the failing tests; make them pass.
- 🛠️ TDD Project Part 2: Library Catalogue Polish — Refactor under green tests; add search, filter, sort.
- 🧩 Challenge: TDD a Mini-App — A 20-line spec; everyone TDDs it from scratch.
- 🛠️ Project: E2E Test a Real Web App — playwright + pytest, the modern stack.
- 🛠️ Capstone: Bring a Real App to 90% Coverage — Take an existing repo (yours or a teammate's) and ship it with a real test suite.
Save hours every week — file ops with pathlib, subprocess, scheduling, logging, web automation with Selenium / Playwright, email + Slack + Discord, scraping pipelines and SSH with paramiko. Forty-eight one-hour lessons, every project something a student could deploy to their own machine that night.
🚀 What you build
- 🧩 Challenge: CSV Olympics — Six file-wrangling problems against the clock.
- 🛠️ Project: Multi-Format Report Generator — Take a CSV; output an Excel report, a PDF cover sheet and a JSON manifest.
- 🛠️ Project: Auto-Fill Form Bot — A bot that submits a daily form for you.
- 🛠️ Project: Multi-Channel Alert System — Trigger → format → fan out to email + Slack + SMS.
- 🛠️ Project: Daily Report Bot — Scrape → transform → email at 8 a.m. every morning.
- 🛠️ Project: Server Maintenance Toolkit — A CLI that backs up, restarts, and reports on a remote box.
- 🛠️ Capstone: Workflow Orchestrator — A multi-step automation with logging, retries, reports and a Slack alert.
Cybersecurity essentials — hashing & encryption, sockets & SSL, port scanning, system monitoring with psutil, the OWASP Top 10, secure coding, JWT/OAuth, secrets management and SSH with paramiko. Forty-eight one-hour lessons, every attack demoed in an isolated environment, every defence taught right after.
🚀 What you build
- 🛠️ Project: Passive Reconnaissance Toolkit — WHOIS, DNS lookups, public-record gathering — non-intrusive recon.
- 🛠️ Project: Encrypted Chat Server — Client + server + TLS — a 50-line private chat.
- 🛠️ Project: Encrypted Message Vault — Save secrets to disk; decrypt only with the right password.
- 🛠️ Project: Build a Port Scanner — Scan a host on YOUR network, report open ports — ethically.
- 🧩 Challenge: Intrusion Detective — Given three log files, identify the attack and the affected accounts.
- 🧩 Challenge: OWASP Bug Hunt — A deliberately vulnerable Flask app — find and patch four bugs.
- 🛠️ Project: Add Auth + RBAC to a Flask App — Take the L4 blog and add admin / editor / reader roles.
- 🛠️ Capstone: Vulnerability Scanner — Combine scanning, hashing, reporting and ethics into a deliverable tool.