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Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

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Re: Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

#11

Post by danoc »

wengzilla wrote: post #7

I'd probably structure it a lot like a bootcamp. Check out Flatiron, gSchool, or Dev Bootcamp's curriculum for some good ideas. To summarize, though, typically it's a few weeks of learning a high-level language (Python or Ruby). From there, it's typically a solid couple of months of learning the corresponding framework (Django or Rails). All the while, sprinkling in some JS and CSS magic. They're usually able to chur…

Thanks!

My main concern is that 2/3 of the people signed up don't have any programming experience, so it will be hard to keep it interesting for CS majors and slow enough for everyone else.

We were thinking of starting off with HTML/CSS since it's not taught in classes then progressing to a server-side language + framework.

I've recommended all of the non-CS majors to go through the JavaScript Codecademy lessons over break to learn the programming fundamentals so they can keep up when we dive into Ruby and RoR (or some other language/framework).

Re: Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

#12

Post by TheBiv »

Speaking of what I would love to do as a college student, I think it would be awesome if a professor was doing something as a challenge against me.

Meaning, I think a lot of time students are told to learn by the professor explaining some of the most basal subjects that we all take for granted anyways (like server architecture, HTTP, etc) and not getting to the juicy cool stuff that we can all do with the web.

What my thought would be is that at the beginning of the semester, the professor took a few days and built a website she thought that the website should exist (it doesn't matter what the website was, just that it was created by them in a matter of days).

Then the entire course was the professor taking the students through all of the design decisions that she made and along the way taught the students how to be a hacker and how to build things on the web.

The challenge would come in the fact that the professor would have a running track of how many users/views the site had and as it grew, the professor could talk about the design optimizations and server architecture in a way that the students would normally experience it.

Re: Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

#14

Post by danoc »

j45 wrote: post #10

I don't think web development is the hard thing to teach as much as problem solving well. I would have them build anything and everything with the caveat that no matter how good they were (or weren't) the quality of their code would suck looking back in 5 years and to start with bad code, and incrementally add concepts like switches, functions, etc., much like very young coders did at age 10-15 when building anything…

> I would have them build anything and everything with the caveat that no matter how good they were (or weren't) the quality of their code would suck looking back in 5 years

Great point!

I had a similar experience growing up, but I think a lot of people that want to learn quickly give up.

What do you think we can do to keep people excited about it? I was talking to a few friends at UMich and they suggested we have them build their own personal websites so they have something tangible they can show their friends.

Re: Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

#16

Post by dkuntz2 »

TheBiv wrote: post #12

Speaking of what I would love to do as a college student, I think it would be awesome if a professor was doing something as a challenge against me. Meaning, I think a lot of time students are told to learn by the professor explaining some of the most basal subjects that we all take for granted anyways (like server architecture, HTTP, etc) and not getting to the juicy cool stuff that we can all do with the web. What m…

While a cool idea, this places a lot of overhead on a professor who most likely already has a bunch of other stuff they need to get done (even at tiny liberal arts colleges).

Expanding on your idea, collectively, or in small groups, students could build that website. From the idea stage to the production stage.

Re: Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

#17

Post by dkuntz2 »

angersock wrote: post #5

So, this is web development in general, not specifically CS software engineering, or electrical engineering, right? Some thoughts, mostly motivated by experience of both what I'd wish I'd known and also in mentoring at Rails Girls and similar community events: ~ Spend some time to explain how the modern web works. Go to " http://www.example.com" and talk about the series of requests that are made (socket, IP, DNS, HT…

I don't know that explaining all of how the web works initially would catch the interest of the 2/3s of the people who aren't CS majors. A lot of people would probably get bored really quickly and stop showing up.

Re: Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

#18

Post by TheBiv »

dkuntz2 wrote: post #16
TheBiv wrote: post #12

Speaking of what I would love to do as a college student, I think it would be awesome if a professor was doing something as a challenge against me. Meaning, I think a lot of time students are told to learn by the professor explaining some of the most basal subjects that we all take for granted anyways (like server architecture, HTTP, etc) and not getting to the juicy cool stuff that we can all do with the web. What m…

While a cool idea, this places a lot of overhead on a professor who most likely already has a bunch of other stuff they need to get done (even at tiny liberal arts colleges). Expanding on your idea, collectively, or in small groups, students could build that website. From the idea stage to the production stage.

I do completely agree that there is a lot of overhead on the professor, but I tend to believe that any professor that would like this idea would be able to rationalize spending a weekend to be able to explain what she created all semester. I can't imagine a cooler lesson plan than detailing your design decisions as you made them.

Re: Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

#19

Post by dkuntz2 »

TheBiv wrote: post #18
dkuntz2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While a cool idea, this places a lot of overhead on a professor who most likely already has a bunch of other stuff they need to get done (even at tiny liberal arts colleges). Expanding on your idea, collectively, or in small groups, students could build that website. From the idea stage to the production stage.

I do completely agree that there is a lot of overhead on the professor, but I tend to believe that any professor that would like this idea would be able to rationalize spending a weekend to be able to explain what she created all semester. I can't imagine a cooler lesson plan than detailing your design decisions as you made them.

Presuming it takes a weekend to solve some sort of problem that at least some other people have. Presuming they're not only a couple weeks ahead of their students in the course's material.

Re: Ask HN: How would you teach web development to college students?

#20

Post by danoc »

angersock wrote: post #5

So, this is web development in general, not specifically CS software engineering, or electrical engineering, right? Some thoughts, mostly motivated by experience of both what I'd wish I'd known and also in mentoring at Rails Girls and similar community events: ~ Spend some time to explain how the modern web works. Go to " http://www.example.com" and talk about the series of requests that are made (socket, IP, DNS, HT…

This is incredibly helpful. Thanks!

> So, this is web development in general, not specifically CS software engineering, or electrical engineering, right?

We really just want to encourage people to get together and build stuff, but the weekly lessons will teach web development.

It'd be great to expand to other areas (especially hardware) in the future.

> Make sure that students are actually doing stuff for everything after the fundamentals lecture: write a static homepage, write a pong game, write a simple message board, etc.

I totally agree, but how can we do that? My best guess is to have 30-45 mins of lectures then encourage them to spend the next 1.5 hours using the lecture material to work on creating a personal website.

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