Crawl, Walk, Code

Howard Kam
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read
Photo credit: TeamTreeHouse.com

Every first level student in my introductory class will begin coding with HTML. Now for the purists who openly advocate that HTML isn’t real coding, I will say this. Put your silver spoon away and understand that a bourgeois attitude toward any software language only sets a learner back, not forward. You see, HTML is a core language that all web pages are built on. It offers the student the fastest way to see a result without special software or the need for a compiler. Text and images are easily coded, displayed, and understood within minutes.

Students in my classroom are first exposed to HTML because I first tell them if they understand basics of syntax, elements, and explicit structure, then other languages will be easier to understand. After they spend a few weeks learning HTML, we move on to CSS. Then things take a fantastic turn when students begin modifying and creating new HTML pages with fantastic styles. While some students still design pages that look like a 1990’s geocities page, others are taking cues from the modern design playbook and trying to replicate it.

They build fan pages about everything they want. Furthermore, they explore different ways of thinking and experiment with code untested by them. They ask themselves “How does that website do that?” Then the student looks at the source code and dives into further exploration.

So listen up purists. Think about a time when you first started to learn what code was. You began simply. Akin to the evolutionary process, we slithered, crawled, walked, and then smashed ten well articulated digits on a keyboard.

Let them crawl. Let them code.

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Written by

I write and teach HTML, CSS, Python, JS, and most importantly, life skills at Roosevelt High School

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