I heard the same thing when I taught Front End Web Development at General Assembly. Beginners don’t need this, noobs don’t need that. Teach them jQuery they said. I’ve implemented a similar curriculum before and by the end of the class Designers were querying APIs. Don’t limit beginners. Everyone deserves to learn in a way that treats them like a professional engineer from Day 1. Giving students that level of respect goes a long way. It can make the difference in someone believing they can code or not.
Valid points, Steve. I agree that all beginners should be treated with a level of respect. My comment was only in the context of a single project that deals with an interactive prototype of a design within a larger course as a whole. I don't know what the rest of the curriculum will be, and I hope it does include Git because it is important to learn. However, if we're talking only about creating a prototype, it sounds like time would be better spent showing the students how they could utilize more sophisticated interactions through fun CSS tricks or a cool JS library like Three.js within their designs rather than showing them version control. It didn't seem necessary to me for a prototype project, but then I have never taught a web development nor a web design class ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Someday hopefully I will!
Oh it’s absolutely necessary. How is the designer supposed to later apply the knowledge they learned in the class to the task of developing a component library? A library they want to see proliferated across the org? Having them setup a dev environment, commit to Git and learn the basics of version control is critical to one of the main use cases a designer would want to learn how to code.
I heard the same thing when I taught Front End Web Development at General Assembly. Beginners don’t need this, noobs don’t need that. Teach them jQuery they said. I’ve implemented a similar curriculum before and by the end of the class Designers were querying APIs. Don’t limit beginners. Everyone deserves to learn in a way that treats them like a professional engineer from Day 1. Giving students that level of respect goes a long way. It can make the difference in someone believing they can code or not.
Valid points, Steve. I agree that all beginners should be treated with a level of respect. My comment was only in the context of a single project that deals with an interactive prototype of a design within a larger course as a whole. I don't know what the rest of the curriculum will be, and I hope it does include Git because it is important to learn. However, if we're talking only about creating a prototype, it sounds like time would be better spent showing the students how they could utilize more sophisticated interactions through fun CSS tricks or a cool JS library like Three.js within their designs rather than showing them version control. It didn't seem necessary to me for a prototype project, but then I have never taught a web development nor a web design class ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Someday hopefully I will!
Oh it’s absolutely necessary. How is the designer supposed to later apply the knowledge they learned in the class to the task of developing a component library? A library they want to see proliferated across the org? Having them setup a dev environment, commit to Git and learn the basics of version control is critical to one of the main use cases a designer would want to learn how to code.
I think, I'll look deeper into codesandbox, they seem to have Git support.
Also, the idea of creating a component for others to use, seems like a good practice. I'll add this to the curriculum.
Thank you both very much for your insights.