Sorry for the late response having something of a mad week, no, no programming skills required what so ever.
So far they have spent much of their time learning an engine called construct 2 (one which i am not familiar with at all but appears to be sub-par from my limited perspective.) I think the thinking behind it is that they would pick up basic programming from that.
It is a games design course not a game art or game programming course so I do think there needs to be some programming learned.