How I Teach Web Development - Part 1

People tend to mystify technology. The teacher’s first objective is to lower herself to the student’s level of understanding, as to turn magic into reality. 

What’s hard to chew should be progressively broken down and made simple to digest. This is why I always go for a top-down approach, starting with the reasons why we do things before going deeper into the intricacies of the craft.

If learning is about empowering, I’ll always make sure to design my course as to help students do more at each of our meetings. No time should be wasted on details that do not bring any practical value: I’ll let them fill in the voids through self-study. 

Owing to this point, the first lesson I give is always about showing how easy it is to build a website, independently of your background. I like to begin by explaining what’s the Internet and how the web works from an end-user’s perspective. It’s possible to build a minimal website in half an hour while describing the core concepts behind the World Wide Web.

After introducing each concept, I go over the cutting-edge tools that will actually help get things done. For example, I’m currently teaching HTML/CSS. Once we go past the basic mechanisms, we will cover TailwindCSS and Git, before diving into Javascript. Strong foundations are essential: learning web development, it’s easy to get lost in the jungle of new technologies. Without being too dogmatic, it’s important to give tools for the students to perform at a professional level right away⁠—even if it’s something as basic as a CSS framework, it helps cutting down the work costs of any engineering team.