I am a coding fan!

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to be invited along as one of the staff on a Year 10 trip to MIT for lesson one of a three lesson coding course.
They were very patient with us as we learned the basics and spent time putting it into practice. The students were a mix of complete novices like me and some with experience from lessons at school.

I was hooked immediately. I loved that what you were doing could be viewed straight away in a browser, so you could see your progress. This appealed to the Graphics teacher / visual learner in me.
We got up to style sheets by the end of the afternoon, but the last 20 minutes of that went right over my head as I was suffering from brain melt.
They promised to go over that gain at the start of the next lesson. I hope so.

So I spent all weekend practicing what we did on Friday and then decided to buy a copy of "Beginning HTML5 and CSS for Dummies". With this together and the w3schools.com website, I started to experiment with different things.

It is a combination of really exciting to have so much control and really frustrating.  You can make it look exactly as you want, but it wont work for the TINIEST little error. All weekend I looked for why my image embedding was not working. Then when I got someone else to look at it on Monday, we realised I had copied the code down off the board wrong on Friday. I had put "scr" instead of "src". ggrrrrr......

Anyway....
I have looked at tables, images, videos and mapped images over the last three days and am feeling good about where I am up to in less than a week.
My next step was to find some free hosting. I didn't want to pay up for something so looked for some free options. I opted for 000webhost.com as they offered a good amount of space for free.

So far I have been designing a site that could be used next year by my Level 2 students, so I am doing a site with information about design eras, starting with Art Deco.
I have 4 pages and a navigation bar to move between them.

Here is the link to the site - there are some blank areas but not too bad. I have been using photoshop to make the graphic elements like the header and the navigation bar.

I find that I am working on it in little slots of time all day. I don't seem to be able to stop fiddling with it!! I think I might be addicted!!

Here are the students last Friday after a busy afternoon coding. They look happy!!

I am hoping that if I get any students in DVC that are also on the DIGI trades course, then they will be able to make their own website as their design portfolio instead of using Google sites.

It opens up all sorts of possibilities.