ICDL Coding Principles (ICDL) study guide
ICDL Coding Principles · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
ICDL Coding Principles (also listed as Coding Principles (ICDL)) is a certification module in the ICDL family of digital-skills credentials. It is aimed at learners who are new to programming, or at non-developers who need to read, reason about and write small programs confidently. Rather than tying the syllabus to one language, the module tests the underlying ideas that transfer between languages: how to break a problem down, how a program is structured, how data is stored and manipulated, and how code is verified once written. The published syllabus is organised into four equally weighted areas: Computational Thinking and Problem Solving; Coding Concepts and Program Structure; Data, Variables and Control Flow; and Testing, Debugging and Documentation. The ICDL Coding Principles study guide has 4 sections and about 1,437 words.
01Computational Thinking and Problem Solving
Computational thinking means framing a messy, real-world problem so precisely that it can be solved step by step, by a computer or by another person. The four pillars are decomposition (splitting a problem into smaller sub-problems that can be tackled separately), pattern recognition (noticing that similar sub-problems, or recurring shapes in data, can be handled the same way), abstraction (removing detail that does not affect the solution and keeping only what does - for example, modelling a customer as an ID, a name and a balance) and algorithm design (writing an unambiguous, finite sequence of steps that solves the problem).
356 words, about 2 min02Coding Concepts and Program Structure
Every program is built from sequence (statements run in order), selection (if / else, case) and iteration (loops). These three structures are enough to express any algorithm, and questions often ask you to say which structure a given snippet uses.
361 words, about 2 min03Data, Variables and Control Flow
A variable is a named store whose value can change; a constant is fixed. Common data types are integer, real (float), character, string, Boolean, and sometimes date and array.
363 words, about 2 min04Testing, Debugging and Documentation
Three error types matter. A syntax error breaks the rules of the language, so the program will not run at all.
357 words, about 2 min