From using websites to building them
My employment at Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Lima began in July 2012. I taught Design Technology there from August 2012 to June 2017. I started in middle school and later moved into high school, teaching students all the way through their junior and senior years.
Coding and Web Design I was aimed at ninth graders. The idea was to take something they used every day—a website—and help them understand how to build one themselves.
We started with a simple HTML boilerplate, organizing folders and linking files. From there, we moved into semantic HTML and CSS. A website needs structure and order, and I wanted students to understand the thinking behind that organization as much as the code.
Building it together
My approach was hands-on. I would explain a concept, sit down at my computer, and build the example on the smart board while students followed along on theirs. I wanted everyone to leave class with something that worked.
Instead of Dreamweaver, I chose Brackets, a simpler code editor that kept the focus on the code. We also spent some time with Photoshop, but the foundation was learning to build and style a website ourselves.
My lesson notes moved from headings, lists, links, and images to external stylesheets, the box model, and navigation. File organization, meaningful image descriptions, and keeping content separate from presentation were part of the work along the way.
From a class exercise to a client project
By the end of the semester, students had to turn in a working website. By the end of the year, the assignment went further: find a client, prepare a design brief, and build a website for that client.
The semester assessment brought the basics together in a two-page website: working navigation, semantic headings, lists, images with alternative text, external links, and a shared CSS file. It was a chance to show that the pieces could work together as a complete site.
The client project added another layer. There were someone else’s needs to consider, a brief to work from, and a reason behind the design decisions.
Keeping the focus on learning
I wanted students to experience uploading their websites to the internet. The school had infrastructure, and I had private hosting, but the practical details made it more complicated than I wanted for the course.
Complicated URLs and shared folders would have added distractions—and opportunities for someone to accidentally change another student’s files. I decided to keep the projects local instead.
We used ManageBac and Google Classroom for coursework and submissions. That let us concentrate on building working websites without making hosting another obstacle to getting the work done.
“IT WORKS!”
Some of my favorite moments were the ones I couldn’t plan: a loud “YES!”, “IT WORKS!”, or “I DID IT!” from somewhere in the classroom.
Sometimes it was a problem finally solved. Sometimes it was the moment a project came together. Those small celebrations were the most satisfying part of teaching the course.
That is what I wanted students to experience: the feeling of taking an idea, working through the problems, and seeing something they built actually work.
