NOW IT BEGINS – GRADED SOURCE CODE WRITING

Over the next 2-3 weeks, you will be coding a variety of page designs. And you will have moments of frustration. No question. But you will also have moments of success. Your responsibility is to push yourself. You will type over a longer period of time than you probably ever typed. And sometimes your hands will get tired. Push through it. You will look at codes for nearly an hour and they will start to look the same. You might even get tired of looking at them. Push through it. No one will be permitted to give up or quit.

On this assignment, the job of the teacher is to push you toward success, not to bail you out. You will not succeed if, like a runner, the teacher does all the work and runs for you. You will not succeed if, like an athlete, the teacher fixes all your mistakes. To succeed at coding, you must accept that you will make mistakes and then show perseverance. The willingness to keep going when it seems like you always hit a wall. The teacher usually moves in to help those who spend time helping themselves. Those who have been patient and tried to solve their own coding errors. The teacher usually avoids students who immediately raise their hands at the first or second or third moment of difficulty. Remember that you have a partner, you have a neighbor, you have a team, and you have a handful of advanced students in the back of the classroom who might be willing to help. On this extended assignment, the teacher is not your resource, but may, at times, come up behind you anyhow and help solve a problem that you’ve been trying to solve on your own.

Between Lesson 2.4 and Lesson 2.9, you are responsible for getting 4 out of 6 source codes completed for an A (3/6 = B, 2/6 = C, 1/6 = D, 0/6 = F). However, if you finish any of these codes early, just keep going because the more pages you build, the more prepared you’ll be for the opening project. Source Codes will be due by the end of Lesson 2.9.

But how will I know if I have completed a code? Below is a table that shows you precisely how to get started. First, you will open the source code and look at the text. Second, you will create a Notepad document and save with the name you see in the /pgs folder. Third, you will begin typing what you saw in the source code into your Notepad document. And fourth, when you have finished typing out the code, you will save your work and open the page with Chrome to see what it looks like. If it looks like the picture in the table, then you have done everything correctly and you should raise your hand for permission to move on to the next code. If it does NOT look like the picture in the table, then you have done something incorrectly and you need to go back through your code to find any errors that you’ve made. ONLY when you have completed a source code can you move on to the next one.

Throughout the class, the teacher will be meeting with various teams at the front of the classroom and asking them to solve a challenge on the board. Teams will have five minutes to work together to answer all the questions before getting quizzed.

Throughout the class, the teacher will also be meeting with various Web Design II students and discussing their lessons and their designs and their progress. The ONLY time you should ever raise your hand for the teacher is when you are ready to move on to the next source code and want approval.

BEGIN

THE VALUE OF PERSEVERANCE (PUSHING THROUGH THE WALL)

What is it and why are we using it?

Codecademy is a website and an application many students use to teach themselves how to code. They learn HTML, and CSS, and JavaScript, and a bunch of other coding languages. During this class, there will be times that the teacher is absent. And when that happens, you will be responsible for logging into Codecademy and continuing on whatever coding lesson you left off. At least for the majority of this class, you will focus on two coding languages: HTML and CSS. You can find the link to Codecademy at the bottom of any page on the class website.