During the last project, you built a bunch of Home Pages for a city, somewhere else in the world. During this project, you will still be doing something that relates to the world, but instead of a single page about a city, you will be building a complete 5-6 page website about a national park within a specific country (the kind of park that is protected for the purpose of conservation and protection of wildlife). Your challenge in this project will be to work with your team to find a national park that you all find interesting, then imagine a website that helps to teach and inform readers about the history or the stories or the animals or the plants of this park.
Between all the things you’ve learned about HTML, CSS, SEO, and JavaScript, you should have a pretty good idea about how to design a decent website. All of the lessons that we’ve done as a class are available to you as a resource during this project. You can go back and look at everything from color palettes to images to animations to search engine optimization. In other words, every student in the room can be successful on this project if everyone uses the resources they have been given, including their teammates. Similar to the last project, you are being graded as a team, not as an individual, so don’t let your team down.
LEARNING GOAL #3: The Basics of CSS
Students will be able to construct multi-page websites using Internal Links and External CSS.
LEARNING GOAL #4: Applied Web Design
Students will understand how to expand and apply their modest knowledge of HTML and CSS through Web Hosting, Search Engine Optimization, JavaScript, and Web Accountability.
A national park is a park in use for conservation purposes. Often it is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state declares or owns. Although individual nations designate their own national parks differently, there is a common idea: the conservation of ‘wild nature’ for posterity and as a symbol of national pride.
Before we start working on any designs, you and your team will need a few minutes to discuss some of the best National Parks from around the world. Your job is to decide on a list of three possible parks that you think would offer enough beautiful pictures and good information for a complete 5-6 page website design. This is a tough decision because there are so many cool and interesting parks in the world, but your job over the next ten minutes is to work with your team to choose three different parks that you might find fun to consider for this project. The reason you need three is because if your first or second choice has already been taken, you’ll have backups. Once your team chooses an official park, you’re locked into that park, but for now, it’s about seeing what parks there are to choose from.
Remember that this is not about any other group or any other students aside from you and your team. Even if you make your decision quickly, use this time to learn a little bit more about the countries you might be using for your final projects.
Take the next 10 min to work with your team and decide on the top three parks that you might wish to design a website around. After 10 minutes, the teacher will toss your team a mini-globe and you must be able to point to the location of the park you and your team have chosen.
Knowing how to get an A is just as important as proving what you can design. Review the Project Grading Rubric in order to understand how you will be graded.
EXPECTATION #1: You may not help another team with their designs until you and your partners (a complete design team) have finished all of your own websites. If you help another team early, then two problems will occur. First, you will lose time working on your own designs. And second, you will make someone else feel like they can always use you as an excuse for not figuring things out on their own.
EXPECTATION #2: If you are absent on one of the project days without a written explanation (doctor’s note, field trip, testing, etc), you will lose at least 10 percentage points on the final grade. And for every day that you are gone, you will continue to lose 10 percentage points.
EXPECTATION #3: Be sure that at least ONE OF YOU are here on the day of grading or ALL students in a group will receive a zero.
On grading day, the teacher will come around from team to team and use the grading rubric to provide students with feedback and a grade on their project.
With any new project, it can be easy to get overwhelmed. But remember that you have everything you could possibly need to be successful. You may NOT use the teacher as a resource, but here is a list of things you CAN use:
ANY of the demos that you made from Learning Goal 3 or 4 (including your Portfolio website)
ANY of the templates that you used from Learning Goal #2
But can we? Yes. Would it be okay if we? Yes. As long as what you are trying to use is appropriate, the answer is yes.
The only NO is that you cannot go make your website on a free website maker like Weebly or Wix. You MUST code your website through HTML and CSS.
Also, the teacher will NOT be helping students with the project, but may, on occasion, offer suggestions, tips, and ideas to students and teams that have been working well together. Teams that do not demonstrate hard work will not get a lot of added support.
So you and your team now have a park filled with beautiful scenery and animals and good information, you know about all the deadlines, you know what’s required to earn an A, you know the rules, and you even know all the resources. But you’re still a little bit overwhelmed. Where do you start? Here is a simple step-by-step suggestion for getting started.
STEP ONE: Set Up Folders
Go into your “pro” folder (from a few weeks ago) and create a new subfolder with the name of your park on it. This is where you can create all your project pages and even save images for your project. That way, you don’t have to worry about making a long file path to any of the images you wish to use.
STEP TWO: Exchange Contact Info
This is a team-based project, so knowing how to communicate with each other is really important. Now is a great time to exchange phone numbers and email addresses. You can even create a Share Folder on Google Drive so that your team can share files and ideas.
STEP THREE: Study Your Park and Figure Out Your Pages
With your team, learn everything you can about the park you selected. Study the animals, the history, the scenery, and the ways that park has been protected over the years. Think about what pages you might want for each part of your website.
STEP FOUR: Design Your Websites
Every member of your team must design at least one complete website, but designing more than one website per member gives your team a better chance of getting an A, so if one member of the team finishes a single website, that member should first assist their team to finish theirs, then get started on another website.
STEP FIVE: Check the Rubric
Before you decide that your team is finished, check the rubric to make sure you’ve done everything necessary to earn the best possible grade. If you get asked questions about whether you applied SEO or JavaScript and you say “What’s that?” then you haven’t really studied the grading rubric. So study it. Make sure you know how your team will get an A or a B.
During the last project, you built a bunch of Home Pages for a city, somewhere else in the world. During this project, you will still be doing something that relates to the world, but instead of a single page about a city, you will be building a complete 5-6 page website about a national park within a specific country (the kind of park that is protected for the purpose of conservation and protection of wildlife). Your challenge in this project will be to work with your team to find a national park that you all find interesting, then imagine a website that helps to teach and inform readers about the history or the stories or the animals or the plants of this park.
Before we start working on any designs, you and your team will need a few minutes to discuss some of the best 
Friday, April 26 (85 Minutes)
Knowing how to get an A is just as important as proving what you can design. Review the 
So you and your team now have a park filled with beautiful scenery and animals and good information, you know about all the deadlines, you know what’s required to earn an A, you know the rules, and you even know all the resources. But you’re still a little bit overwhelmed. Where do you start? Here is a simple step-by-step suggestion for getting started.