Web Programming at PATHS

Next year’s course descriptions are now here! Course numbers will likely change.

September 2008-January 2009
WP103 – Standards-Based Web Design and Development

Open up a Web page and select View->Source from your browser menu. Do you understand the code? After taking this course, you will. Say goodbye to old table- and frameset-based layouts and say hello to modern, flexible design techniques using CSS! After taking this course, you will be fluent in HTML and CSS, and will have experience applying principles of graphic design and layout to make Web pages that look good in a variety of Web browsers and have solid code underneath. Week-long instructional segments covering software programs such as Dreamweaver, Fireworks, PhotoShop, and Flash will make you familiar with these tools of the trade. Basic knowledge of FTP commands will also be covered for transferring your files to and from Web servers.

Prerequisite: none

January 2009-June 2009
WP104 – Dynamic Web Application Development

If you already know how to write stylish Web pages with clean code, take your skills to the next level by adding MySQL and PHP to your personal toolkit. Want to write online registration applications, message boards, shopping carts, or other applications that require a database on the back end? This is the course for you. You’ll learn the basics of adding, deleting, and accessing data in a MySQL database, and you’ll learn to use PHP (a standard Web application language) to pull data from a database and transform it into styled HTML. Experience with common software design patterns in PHP programming and SQL queries will allow you to apply what you learn to future programming projects. You’ll also set up a test server using Apache, MySQL and PHP, and learn how to set up domains and subdomains on a hosted server.

Prerequisite: WP103 or permission from the instructor.

Click here for a list of things to print. Find and measure golden ratios.

Here’s a good site on Phi (1.618) and phi (.618). I don’t think they used either ratio in their site design, but it’s a good overview…

“The Golden Section” from goldennumber.net

Here are some fun lists for “do”s and “don’t”s:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991003.html

Please read these articles before doing the logo design assignment. I’m thinking of some study questions for this reading.

1. First, read this article by Chuck Green for a good overview of his logo design process.
2. Dmitry Kirsanov: The Art of Logo, Part I
3. Dmitry Kirsanov: The Art of Logo, Part II
4. Logo Design Revisited: Dmitry Kirsanov rethinks his original logo design

Next week I will be meeting with Ms. Manzi, Mr. Nichols, Mr. Beane, and Bob Bettencourt from Channel 6 to discuss the upcoming PhotoShop courses. Stay tuned!

See p. 24 of the Lie/Bos text (bottom, Figure 1.14) for the anatomy of an HTML tag.

The best descriptions of block vs. inline elements I’ve seen so far are:

page 15 of the Lie/Bos text
here (page down to the “Block-level and Inline Elements” heading)

This tutorial includes a video demonstration of how relative paths look, including ../

http://www.easywebtutorials.com/html-tutorial/lessons/links.html#paths

As I’m reading and thinking about teaching QA methods, writing test cases from use cases, etc., I realize that these methods require good coding skills. I can get students used to reading usage scenarios and requirements, and I can include test plans for them to use. Can I get them ready to think about test cases and refactoring/modularizing their code by second semester? It will require homework to reinforce concepts, which is a good thing. It will require me to streamline the way I introduce some programming concepts, which is also a good thing.

Today I was looking through a handout I received a while ago, about curriculum design (starting with a Learning Result and going backwards to figure out how to achive that result). I think it’s time to put test-based design into practice: I need to write the mid-term and the final now, and then design my curriculum so that students who follow it will pass those tests. This is cool.