A program is a list of instructions for a computer. The computer follows them one at a time, from the top, exactly as written. It never guesses what you meant, which is frustrating at first and very useful later: a program does the same thing every time you run it.

The instructions in this course are written in Python, one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It is used to build websites, analyse data, control robots and train AI models, and it is one of the easiest languages to read.

Here is a complete Python program. Press Run to see what it does.

print("Hello!")

print is an instruction that shows something on the screen. Whatever goes inside the brackets is what gets shown. The words are wrapped in quote marks so Python knows they are text and not more instructions.