All good things...
Hmmm. It was our final session today, a short one, just over an hour.A little sad, really.
I arrived twenty minutes before class and set up my laptop in the computer lab. Lisa and I decided we would conduct the final presentation in the lab because the classroom was just too bright. I'd just have to handle the "not looking at me bit" as best I could.
So, the class came in at nine, and took their seats on the floor in front of me. A few of them looked a little sad as well, mostly the ones I'd been doing the web site with, though I couldn't decide whether it was because it was our last session together or because they wouldn't get to play with computers anymore. ;)
So, we started off with a presentation about post-design activities, generally some basics of troubleshooting, promoting the site, and maintenance. They were more responsive than during the first presentation, maybe because they'd gotten more used to my style.
Following the presentation, we presented the rest of the class with their class website. It wasn't quite completed yet, since the kids hadn't had enough time to check everything, but it was mostly there. It's pretty basic, with bright colours, and not really standards compliant. They probably implemented about half the tricks I tried to teach them, and not any of the more complex ones. But overall, I think the kids did a fantastic job. Considering that I myself only ever got into webdev when I was 21, and I only know the stuff I do because I've been playing around for three years, it's actually a really good job for a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds who've had only around thirteen contact hours with me (not including the intro). So I'm pretty happy with the results.
I'd originally wanted to give them a demonstration on CSS and its capabilities. I even created a mock website and three different stylesheets to show how you can control all the styles and formatting through just one file. Took me a few hours at home just to prepare it.
And I forgot to bring it along.
Well, not forgot exactly; I just copied the wrong files into my folder. So I went to open up the files, and was left thinking "Waiiiiiiiiit a minute...what the hell is this?"
So in the end, I had to do the entire demonstration on the fly, which is no easy task. But I think I mostly demonstrated everything I wanted to show them, so I guess I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
Not too happy with the time I wasted at home, though. ;)
Well, at least the kids looked suitably impressed.
So we wrapped the whole thing up with a final Q&A. I'm actually quite happy that a number of them seem quite interested in webdev, asking questions like "Where do we go from here?" and "Where can I learn more about...". Hopefully some of them actually go on to taking it up as a hobby, or maybe even professionally.
Then maybe someday a designer at the Web Design Awards might actually go "I'd like to thank Scott for getting me interested in Webdev when I was still in Primary School". ;)
posted by Scott @ 2:40 pm
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