The programming half of HSC ICT, taught properly and given away. Chapters 5 and 6 are where most ICT marks are won or lost, and they are the two chapters most likely to be rushed in the last month of a college syllabus.

It is free because the calculation is simple: a student who understands programming does better in every subsequent Bikiron course, and a student who has been told to memorise C code does not.

Why memorising programs does not work

The standard approach to HSC ICT is to memorise a dozen programs and hope one of them appears. It half-works, which is the problem — it gets you through some papers and collapses the moment the board changes a variable or asks for a trace.

A program you memorised is a program you cannot debug. If the exam changes one line, you have nothing left to reason with.

This course teaches the small number of ideas the whole chapter is built on — variables, conditions, loops, arrays, functions — and then derives the standard programs from them in front of you.

What it covers

• Number systems and their conversions, since everything else assumes them

• Algorithms and flowcharts — and how to turn one into the other

• C fundamentals: data types, input and output, operators

• Conditions and branching

• Loops, and the off-by-one errors that account for most lost marks

• Arrays and strings

• Functions and scope

• Tracing a program by hand — the skill the board actually tests

• Database concepts and relationships

• SQL basics: SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY and simple joins

Hand-tracing is the whole exam

A large share of ICT programming marks come from predicting output rather than writing code. Every topic here ends with a trace exercise: you write down what each variable holds after each iteration, before you are allowed to run anything.

How it runs

Self-paced from 7 September to 15 December 2026. Everything opens on day one and nothing is gated, so you can move at whatever speed your college schedule leaves room for.

There are no live classes. This is recorded material plus practice sets, which is what lets it stay free and open to three hundred students at once.

What free does and does not mean

The material is complete — no locked chapters and no paid tier holding back the useful half. What you do not get is individual attention: written work is not marked one-to-one, and questions are answered in the course Q&A rather than privately.

Who it is for

• HSC students taking ICT, in either year

• Students who can use a computer but have never written code

• Anyone who has been memorising programs and can feel that it is not working

No prior programming is assumed. If you have written code before, start at the tracing exercises and skip the syntax.

Enrolment

Free, and public. Three hundred places, enrolment open from 15 August to 5 September 2026.

Access does not expire when the course ends — the recordings and practice sets stay available.