Interesting first webpage ideas
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So apparently I got roped into teaching my brother how to do HTML. He's in fourth grade.
What's interesting enough to keep him engaged for a first project? Anything you can do without first knowing CSS is going to be pretty boring :/
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How old is fourth grade?
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Year 5 so 9/10.
Edit: or 11 in DiscoYears.
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Anything you can do without first knowing CSS is going to be pretty boring :/
True, and what's worse, it won't "look like a real web page."
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Just HTML, or JavaScript too?
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We'll see how he does with CSS before we talk about javascript. I suspect javascript will be a later year.
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You're going to need images to make it interesting, so how about something like an image gallery?
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ooh, or maybe a newsletter for his homeschool class? Not a CMS but a static page he can print out and show his mum.
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Recreating a newspaper layout could be an interesting project with HTML and CSS, and lead into an interesting project to teach PHP.
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When I was in school, I created a webpage for my family. It consisted of a home site with links to each family member's page. Each family members page had a picture and bio as well as recent news regarding them.
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If there is something they are a fan of (show, sports team, game, whatever) a simple fan page could work for showing different parts of layout stuff (which is the big thing you can teach with just HTML). A couple of paragraphs in one spot, a list, some images that kind of thing to get the real basics.
The main thing is to find a topic that can hold interest (so doesn't get bored with it) and lets them play with more than just text or just images. If they go "how do I do this?" it is retained much much better than "hey, here is how you put an image over here".
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Anything related to video games should do the trick, try a guild/clan page.
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His mom likes the idea of a newsletter for his homeschool group, and he can ask the other kids to send him articles or something. I've got a server so I'll host it when he's ready to show it off.
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Just make sure you're paying attention to the kids interest. If he's not enjoying the project he's not going to learn anything and will ultimately have a suck experience with no benefits to him at all.
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Computer game reviews might be interesting for him. The front page could list each game with a thumbnail image. Each entry would link through to a page containing the game's full description or review with an image gallery.
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Online birthday card or as mentioned Newspaper layout might be good.
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The front page could list each game with a thumbnail image. Each entry would link through to a page containing the game's full description or review with an image gallery.
I'll probably use this tactic with the newsletter thing. If he gets bored after a couple sessions I'll ask him what he'd rather make. Maybe he'll have an idea :)
Mum seems to think he can only do 15 minute sessions at a time so....
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You should go full monty with jquery panels for drag and drop ui!
cough.
(this: http://jqueryui.com/draggable/)
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I'll probably use this tactic with the newsletter thing. If he gets bored after a couple sessions I'll ask him what he'd rather make.
That could work. A basic thing to teach some stuff, but I'd recommend going to what he would like to make before boredom sets in as that way you can get actual engagement (which is where useful retention of knowledge happens). The real big question on how well this would work is who are you being asked to teach this by?
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A basic thing to teach some stuff, but I'd recommend going to what he would like to make before boredom sets in as that way you can get actual engagement (which is where useful retention of knowledge happens).
He can document his Minecraft builds.
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You should go full monty with jquery panels for drag and drop ui!
Might as well implement infiniscroll too.
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Mum seems to think he can only do 15 minute sessions at a time
At that age he should be able to focus his attention for longer than that, if he's interested in what he needs to focus on, anyway. If not, he's not interested, he has an attention problem, or he has parents/teachers who are too lax.
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So apparently he's beside himself with glee having heard of the plan. Mum says:
"First he said COOL! and then he said 'I have never learned ANYTHING from my sister in my nine years of living! This will be SO COOL!!' Third, he did his 'happy dance'.
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At that age he should be able to focus his attention for longer than that,
I agree. I'm a little concerned about how his usual homeschooling goes if that's what she thinks his attention span ought to be...
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So apparently he's beside himself with glee having heard of the plan. Mum says:
>"First he said COOL! and then he said 'I have never learned ANYTHING from my sister in my nine years of living! This will be SO COOL!!' Third, he did his 'happy dance'.
They're cute before their souls are crushed by the corporate machine.
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I'm fascinated by how well he manages to hit that guilt button from thousands of miles away. He'll go far.
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When I was a kid, I made a webpage on my 2 MB of AOL space (actually by chaining together like 5 screennames' worth of 2 MB... but anyway) to show off my collection of animated gifs.
As it turns out, everything old is new again, so there you go.
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I would have thought a first dabble with HTML where he can see writing something does stuff very quickly might be in order.
If you set up a page with a bunch of linked CSS and scripts that will just take any text box and any submit button and lay it all out pretty, and then set up a script on submit to update the title or cornify (maybe star wars, do kids still like star wars? if not, maybe ben 10, all kids must love ben 10, I mean it rhymes right? ok, if he's a loony he might not like ben 10, but he will DEFINITELY like Angelina Ballerina, everyone does) the page including big flashing stars around the text entered into the box copied all over the place sort of deal. then you can abstract away the more boring stuff (like each page has a head, a body, is surrounded by a global html tag and has an accompanying stylesheet to make it pretty) and just teach him in the first instance that adding things makes things is as simple as <p>words</p> and also teaches early the value of modularity and abstraction in making things easier to understand.
once he has done something cool like that his attention should be grabbed, just in time for the end of the 15 minute session.
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In my highschool years I tried teaching some HTML to some other students in a computer-course. It was a nightmare
Motivating people to start at the basics while everything they see is very advanced is really hard. But then again, I find it easier to teach people 1 on 1 which applies more to your situation.Though one thing I noticed in both scenarios is that people who never even tried to program have a very weird grasp of their limitations. I have a friend who at the age of ~20 told me he wanted to start learning HTML so he could create the next Warcraft-game. As you can hopefully tell, he didn't make it. I think he didn't even start HTML... so there is that.
So the point of this post is: if you ask him what he wants to do next, be sure to teach him the limitations of his system first. Because the internet of today gives you a really weird sense of what is actually possible with simple HTML.
Filed Under: I only a small rant here and I think I lost track of what I wanted to say already.... I am so bad
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NECRO!
So I'm trying to figure out how to explain anchor tags. I plan to walk him through placing anchors next to a few headlines and then making a table of contents, then onto linking to other pages. Why the fuck are they called anchors? In terms that a 10-year-old can follow and remember easily; we've made great headway with "p stands for paragraph" and "h stands for heading, so h1 is heading level 1".
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Because you can use them as destinations, anchoring the page to the bit you want to point it at, with #
See, # has a use beyond shortcutting links that you're going to be grabbing the onclick of!
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>Why the fuck are they called anchors?
They're anchor points.
Why are they called Frobulators? Because they frobulate
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Why are they called Frobulators? Because they frobulate
Anchor:
Anchor point:
http://waexternalsolutions.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stainless-steel-anchor.jpg
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Make a frontend for Discourse!
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anchor points
Anchor points! That makes a TON more sense than boat anchors.
I'm sitting here going, "Okay, so, pretend you're a fish, and you want to find a boat, but you'er at the bottom of the ocean, so you see an anchor, and you go, aha, there must be a boat, so you follow the chain links (hyperlinks) up until you find the content you wanted..."
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Because you can use them as destinations
Yes, that's what we're going to be doing, putting in anchor points beside headings and then making a TOC with same-page links. But I was picturing boat anchors so the metaphor didn't make any sense.
