Schooltijd
I was in Amsterdam last week. Usually I’m in that city for an event like the excellent CSS Day. Not this time. I was there as a guest of Vasilis. He invited me over to bother his students at the CMD (Communications and Multimedia Design) school.
There’s a specific module his students are partaking in that’s right up my alley. They’re given a PDF inheritance-tax form and told to convert it for the web.
Yes, all the excitement of taxes combined with the thrilling world of web forms.
Seriously though, I genuinely get excited by the potential for progressive enhancement here. Sure, there’s the obvious approach of building in layers; HTML first, then CSS, then a sprinkling of JavaScript. But there’s also so much potential for enhancement within each layer.
Got your form fields marked up with the right input types? Great! Now what about autocomplete, inputmode, or pattern attributes?
Got your styles all looking good on the screen? Great! Now what about print styles?
Got form validation working? Great! Now how might you use local storage to save data locally?
As well as taking this practical module, most of the students were also taking a different module looking at creative uses of CSS, like making digital fireworks, or creating works of art with a single div. It was fascinating to see how the different students responded to the different tasks. Some people loved the creative coding and dreaded the progressive enhancement. For others it was exactly the opposite.
Having to switch gears between modules reminded me of switching between prototypes and production:
Alternating between production projects and prototyping projects can be quite fun, if a little disorienting. It’s almost like I have to flip a switch in my brain to change tracks.
Here’s something I noticed: the students love using :has() in CSS. That’s so great to see! Whereas I might think about how to do something for a few minutes before I think of reaching for :has(), they’ve got front of mind. I’m jealous!
In general, their challenges weren’t with the vocabulary or syntax of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The more universal problem was project management. Where to start? What order to do things in? How long to spend on different tasks?
If you can get good at dealing with those questions and not getting overwhelmed, then the specifics of the actual coding will be easier to handle.
This was particularly apparent when it came to JavaScript, the layer of the web stack that was scariest for many of the students.
I encouraged them to break their JavaScript enhancements into two tasks: what you want to do, and how you then execute that.
Start by writing out the logic of your script not in JavaScript, but in whatever language you’re most comfortable with: English, Dutch, whatever. In the course of writing this down, you’ll discover and solve some logical issues. You can also run your plain-language plan past a peer to sense-check it.
It’s only then that you move on to translating your logic into JavaScript. Under each line of English or Dutch, write the corresponding JavaScript. You might as well put // in front of the plain-language sentence while you’re at it to make it a comment—now you’ve got documentation baked in.
You’ll still run into problems at this point, but they’ll be the manageable problems of syntax and typos.
So in the end, it wasn’t my knowledge of specific HTML, CSS, or JavaScript APIs that proved most useful to pass on to the students. It was advice like that around how to approach HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
I also learned a lot during my time at the school. I had some very inspiring conversations with the web developers of tomorrow. And I was really impressed by how much the students got done just in the three days I was hanging around.
I’d love to do it again sometime.