This article describes the experience of teaching structural bioinformatics to third year undergraduate students in a subject titled "Biomolecular Structure and Bioinformatics." Students were introduced to computer programming and used this knowledge in a practical application as an alternative to the well established Internet bioinformatics approach that relies on access to the Internet and biological databases. This was an ambitious approach considering that the students mostly had a biological background. There were also time constraints of eight lectures in total and two accompanying practical sessions. The main challenge was that students had to be introduced to computer programming from a beginner level and in a short time provided with enough knowledge to independently solve a simple bioinformatics problem. This was accomplished with a problem directly relevant to the rest of the subject, concerned with the structure-function relationships and experimental techniques for the determination of macromolecular structure.