When I got laid off five years ago, I did what they tell you to do: I wrote down all the things I was good at and or liked to do, then tried to combine them into possible jobs. It was one of those exercises that you can’t imagine will be helpful but ends up exposing some hidden parts of yourself. The list itself is long gone, but the result is easy to remember: I wanted a job helping classroom teachers integrate technology into their curriculum.
I pursued the idea for a little bit, but then the job at the University of Chicago came along, and while it didn’t fit my goal exactly, it seemed at least a step in the right direction. That job lasted a few years, then evolved into my current freelance career, and while it’s been wholly satisfying and successful, I still think about what it’d take to get myself closer to the classroom.
So when Ruthie—who I’d known only tangentially for many years—started twittering about all the fun she was having as a Lab School computer science teacher, the gears started turning again. I dropped her a note out of the blue, basically an offer for lunch if she’d spend an hour telling me about her career and letting me bounce ideas off her about my interests. She obliged, and we met up a couple weeks ago. It was great—she got me excited about seeking this kind of work out again, which led into a brainstorm of how I could help her out with her program.
The upshot is: I’m now helping her plan out the curriculum for a course she’s teaching this summer on web design. The kids will be middle schoolers, mostly, both from the school and the community. The mission is pretty broad—it’s a class on “web design,” and beyond that, the details are up to us.
I’m pretty stoked about it, of course. Who wouldn’t want to the chance to mold the minds of a couple dozen little web designers-to-be? But at the same time I’m worried. From what Ruthie told me about her experience teaching a similar course last year, these kids get it, and fast. My fear is I will woefully underestimate their abilities to pick up the material, that within days they’ll be the ones teaching me, and I’ll be left feeling like the old man in his jalopy who still swears by the slide rule.
The solution, I think, is to focus on fundamentals. Cheap coding tricks are a dime a dozen online; it takes a lot more time and experience to know what actually works. Ruthie and I brainstormed this weekend and I think we’ve got a pretty good list started on what’s relevant to teach. (Relevance being really difficult to gauge with this group—some of these kids are likely to start up their own web design business before the summer’s over. Not joking.) I’ll probably write up a post about it once it gets refined, but until then, I’m curious:
If you had the chance to teach a group of ten- to twelve-year-olds the fundamentals of web design, what would you tell them?
Responses to “Of tags and clicks and CSS”
April 16th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I was once invited to teach a session of a graduate seminar on “Technology in Humanities Research,” by Martin Mueller, who at the time was the chair of the Northwestern English department. I spoke for about an hour about various ways that XML markup can be used to help analyze, introspect and understand ancient texts. At the end, they were still staring somewhat blankly at me, and when I called for questions I got a lot of extremely basic questions that had nothing to do with what I’d been talking about. A lot of which was ground that I figured Martin would have covered beforehand.
What I learned from this experience was the following: you are likely to either over- or underestimate your audience’s ability to follow what you’re doing. I would try to either a) gather some information about the kids’ level of knowledge beforehand, or b) don’t plan out the curriculum too far in advance. Plan a couple of initial exercises and be prepared to adjust up or down accordingly. I didn’t get to do this, because I was only there for one hour.
I’d try to emphasize design patterns, and then back that up with specific coding examples. I wouldn’t suggest it as a text (it’s the size of a telephone book) but _The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites_ is a pretty good pattern language book for web design, written by some chief muckety-mucks from Google, Yahoo, etc. You might try to teach them the Cliff’s Notes version of that.
April 27th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I think they might be bored if you teach them from the ground up. I know my nieces get bored when I try to show them stuff. They want to see results fast. I’m thinking of just showing them WordPress and letting them hack away at a theme as a way of getting their feet wet…
I like your work, by the way.
April 16th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Designing with Web Standards would definitely be my textbook. If the kids are as sharp as advertised.
One thing I’d want to get across is that what a page looks like is maybe half or less of what web design is.
And no WYSIWYG. Make them write code.