What shall I include in a 10 week web technologies course?
- by Iain
In September I will be teaching a university module on web technologies. This session will be available to 1st year (freshman) students who don't necessarily have any programming knowledge or know how the web works.
In the 2nd semester I will be teaching Flash, which is my specialism, so I know exactly what I am going to teach, but in the 1st semester I will be teaching them web standards technologies - HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, PHP and MySQL.
Where I need advice is how to proportion the emphasis for each part, and which parts of each technology to cover. Another real issue I'm struggling with is how much of the bad old ways should I teach them? Do they need to know about bold as well as strong, etc. UPDATE: based, on your feedback I will only be teaching the latest version of everything - CSS3, HTML5 etc.
I'm not sure exactly how long the semester will be but I'm guessing about 10-12 weeks. Each session is a 2 hour lab. Obviously there's only so much I can cover in that time and it will be up to the students to go a research this stuff properly on W3 schools etc.
My ideas so far were:
Lesson 0 - Course intro and overview of the current tech landscape. What is out there, what will we be learning, what won't we. What is a web server, URL etc. Looking at different example websites and discussing how they work.
Lesson 1 - HTML basics (head, body, title, img, table, a, lists, h1, strong etc)
Lesson 2 - CSS for styling and layout - fonts, webfonts, float etc
Lesson 3 - Intro to programming JS (variables, loops, conditionals, functions)
Lesson 4 - more JS programming fundamentals, DOM manipulation
Lesson 5 - jQuery - making things fly about and look cool
Lesson 6 - XML and Ajax
Lesson 7 - PHP basics - syntax, server-side principles
Lesson 8 - PHP and MySQL - forms, logins, saving user info
Lesson 9 - don't know
Lesson 10 - don't know
Please let me know if you think this is the right order, what have I missed, how to use any spare sessions etc. Thanks :)
UPDATE BASED ON RESPONSES:
Thanks for all your responses - some great stuff. To be absolutely clear, this is not a computer science course, it is a practical module on a creative technology course. The emphasis definitely has to be on making cool things work rather than understanding how the backbone of the internet works. That can come later, if the students are interested. At the end of the module I would like the students to be able to produce a web page or pages that does something cool, using some or all of the technologies I cover. Many of these topics are of course far beyond the scope of a 2 hour session, however I do not have the option of reducing the syllabus, I will just have to explain what the technology does and encourage the student to research it in their own time.
