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Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

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Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#41

Post by tshaddox »

devnulll wrote: post #24
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Pedagogy" - I don't know what that means It means “teaching methods”.

The meta-point is that the usage of complex words is off-putting to those trying to learn something for the first time. There's always an element of "I don't know what this is, so I can skip it" but better to keep topics simple and approachable.

The linked document seems pretty clearly addressed to both teachers and students, which might not be a great decision. If they had an entry point dedicated only to students they could probably leave out all the places where they mention pedagogy. That said, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to criticize “pedagogy” as being a complicated term. It’s okay to occasionally need to look up something in a dictionary, especially in cases like this where it’s an incredibly precise and standard word for the concept it’s referring to. You could also find and replace all mentions of “biology” with “the study of life,” but I think using these terms are fine even if a very small portion of readers need to look it up once in the dictionary.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#42

Post by dajonker »

pdevr wrote: post #18

Arguably the best web development curriculum for children that I have seen from any of the top technology companies. Congratulations. One question: Did you consider splitting up these pictures into smaller pictures? As an example, look at this page[1]. The picture seems to have a lot of things in there. Did you consider using multiple smaller pictures? [1] https://microsoft.github.io/Web-Dev-For-Beginners/#/2-js-bas.…

I'm not sure I would recommend this for kids. It seems quite abstract and children often have a hard time with abstract thinking.

The course starts off with seven lessons on tooling and JavaScript fundamentals before you actually do something in lesson 8. That's a lot of theory to process.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#43

Post by andi999 »

solarengineer wrote: post #31
devnulll wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been using this one: https://www.w3schools.com/html/ He's had no trouble at all following along and using their tooling. I've been mostly hands-off. I'm about to graduate him from "do it in just the browser" to using GitHub pages. That way he can have an HTML site that's "his" and start putting the pieces together.

You may also want to consider a Droplet for his next website. He will learn about the plumbing. That way, when ever he is filled with self-doubt and needs reaffirmation, he would be able to put things together from the ground up and regain confidence.

What is a Droplet?

Edit: seriously. Non native speaker here, I have never heard the term. Googling shows: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets

So a VM from this vendor is meant? Why?

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#44

Post by userbinator »

about JavaScript, CSS, and HTML basics

...and this is where it goes off the rails; teaching JS before HTML is how we will continue to have the ridiculous proliferation of app-sites that shouldn't require a single line of JS instead needing the latest version of $browser (you have a choice of browser - pick one ...) to even show any content at all. Forms don't need any JS to work, yet the impression this gives to beginners is that they do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313

But then again, this is Microsoft, which is now firmly in bed with Google in contributing to the Big Browser monopoly, so I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything else. The agenda is obvious to anyone who cares to look.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#45

Post by MrJohz »

devnulll wrote: post #13

One of my kids - 10yrs old - has been wanting to learn basic HTML and "programming". We've been going through the W3C with no trouble, and he's learning at an amazing rate. This tutorial is way beyond anything he could approach. For example "Pedagogy" - I don't know what that means, and neither does he. Another example, from the beginning "In this section of the curriculum, you will be introduced to non project-based…

I don't think it's a translation issue, rather I get the impression that this has been written by educationalists for educationalists. So the pedagogical section is written using the basic technical language for that field, because the assumption is that the main target audience will be familiar with those terms.

It's a bit like how I might prepare a document for colleagues and a non-technical product owner, and I need to overall contents to be clear enough (and non-technical enough) for the PO to understand, but I also want to put technical details in for my colleagues who understand jargon like "load testing" or whatever else. I don't need to simplify the section on load testing and remove that sort of jargon, because in principle it's not necessary for the PO to precisely understand those details.

So I don't think it's a translation issue, but rather it's not designed to be directly a tutorial for getting started with programming, but rather a tool for teachers to teach lessons on getting started with programming.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#46

Post by onion2k »

devnulll wrote: post #13

One of my kids - 10yrs old - has been wanting to learn basic HTML and "programming". We've been going through the W3C with no trouble, and he's learning at an amazing rate. This tutorial is way beyond anything he could approach. For example "Pedagogy" - I don't know what that means, and neither does he. Another example, from the beginning "In this section of the curriculum, you will be introduced to non project-based…

Our project-based pedagogy allows you to learn while building, a proven way for new skills to 'stick'.

The annoying thing about this sentence is that "pedagogy" could be replaced with "approach" or "method" and no meaning would be lost.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#47

Post by nlnn »

I'm an experienced backend developer but always struggled with learning modern web development.

I understand all the core well (html, CSS, JavaScript, etc.), but struggle with choosing the right high level abstraction/framework/technology for ideas I want to implement.

E.g. should I make it a single page app or not? Should I be using ES6 imports? Which build tool? Would I want React or Vue or something simpler here? Should I use SSR? NPM vs. Yarn? Do I need a CSS compiler? Maybe I should be using TypeScript? Wepback?

Basically I'm overwhelmed with choices, but struggle to find useful docs on why a lot of these tools came about, what problems they solve, tradeoffs for using them, etc.

Asking the web devs I know in person doesn't help much (“just use React for everything, it's fine").

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#48

Post by HWR_14 »

devnulll wrote: post #24
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Pedagogy" - I don't know what that means It means “teaching methods”.

The meta-point is that the usage of complex words is off-putting to those trying to learn something for the first time. There's always an element of "I don't know what this is, so I can skip it" but better to keep topics simple and approachable.

> usage of complex words is off-putting to those trying to learn something for the first time.

I prefer when I'm learning something new if it treats me like an intelligent person who is ignorant of that topic. So, yes, if you want to teach me something be gentle in the language from that subject. But please assume I do know some things.

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#49

Post by khingebjerg »

jlooper wrote: post #8

Just want to thank you for your kind comments, it's making me happy :) - cheers from Jen, maintainer of these repos and curriculum designer / author at Microsoft

It looks great, thank you. I think it’s great to introduce accessibility early, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a brief introduction to HTML before the accessibility section? Or are you supposed to read about HTML on MDN as part of section 01?

Re: Web Development for Beginners – A Curriculum

#50

Post by defanor »

A bit of bikeshedding (and I'm not an educator, so take that with a grain of salt), and I guess different views on a good curriculum are to be expected, but a few things I noticed upon a skimming:

- No basic HTML "hello, world" in the beginning to hook the reader and show that they can easily make web pages. It seems that they should wade through quite a few lessons, including JS ones, before composing the most basic page (assuming no prior knowledge of that).

- The first lesson is somewhat thorough, touching an assembly language (which is nice), yet mixes together shells and terminal emulators (which seems okay for a gentle introduction, but potentially confusing).

- No historical context (at least in the first two lessons), which is common to omit, but I think it helps to learn the motivation and basic ideas behind the subject you are studying, to better understand it all.

- Accessibility is explained before HTML itself, with an HTML-based quiz. I agree it's important, and the lesson looks good, but I imagine it'd be confusing/boring/seemingly unnecessary to read before even the basics of HTML (I'd probably keep thinking of learning how to make actual pages myself). Better understanding of accessibility issues may also come with demonstrations, showing why it's important (otherwise it's probably also easy to dismiss as silly or unnecessary). The lesson also mentions the "Lighthouse" tool, I don't think it's present in Firefox by default (looks like there is an extension).

- Then there's a bunch of JS lessons, before learning to make even basic static pages.

- Then there's finally HTML introduction, but only introducing 'html' and 'body' tags, and with a lot of--likely confusing to an absolute beginner--attributes in the examples, including classes.

- CSS follows those, at which point classes are likely to make more sense.

- Then there are JS-based games and web browser extensions, while we've barely learned to make basic HTML pages (though I don't think we really did).

- Only towards the end there are HTML forms, after all the interactive JS bits.

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