Knowing and Doing

Earlier this week, I posted an item on Mastodon:

After a few months studying and using CSS, every once in a while I am able to change a style sheet and cause something I want to happen. It feels wonderful. Pretty soon, though, I'll make a typo somewhere, or misunderstand a property, and not be able to make anything useful happen. That makes me feel like I'm drowning in complexity.

Thankfully, the occasional wonderful feelings — and my strange willingness to struggle with programming errors — pull me forward.

I've been learning a lot while preparing to teach to our web development course [ 1 | 2 ]. Occasionally, I feel incompetent, or not very bright. It's good for me.

I haven't been blogging lately, but I've been writing lots of words. I've also been re-purposing and adapting many other words that are licensed to be reusable (thanks, David Humphrey and John Davis). Prepping a new course is usually prime blogging time for me, with my mind in a constant state of churn, but this course has me drowning in work to do. There is so much to learn, and so much new material — readings, session plans and notes, examples, homework assignments — to create.

I have made a few notes along the way, hoping to expand them into posts. Today they become part of this post.

VS Code

This is my first time in a long time using an editor configured to auto-complete and do all the modern things that developers expect these days. I figured, new tool, why not try a new workflow...

After a short period of breaking in, I'm quite enjoying the experience. One feature I didn't expect to use so much is the ability to collapse an HTML element. In a large HTML file, this has been a game changer for me. Yes, I know, this is old news to most of you. But as my brother loves to say when he gets something used or watches a movie everyone else has already seen, "But, hey, it's new to me!" VS Code's auto-complete across HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with built-in documentation and links to MDN's more complete documentation, lets me type code much faster than ever before. It made me think of one of my favorite Kent Beck lines:

As the speed of development approaches infinity, reuse becomes irrelevant.

When programming, I often copy, paste, and adapt previous code. In VS Code, I have found myself moving fast enough that copy, paste, and adapt would slow me down. That sort of reuse has become irrelevant.

Examples > Prose

The class sessions for which I have written the longest and most complete notes for my students (and me) tend to be the ones for which I have the fewest, or least well-developed, code examples. The reverse is also true: lots of good examples and code tends to mean smaller class notes. Sometimes that is because I run out of time to write much prose to accompany the session. Just as often, though, it's because the examples give us plenty to do live in class, where the learning happens in the flow of writing and examining code.

This confirms something I've observed over many years of teaching: Examples First tends to work better for most students, even people like me who fancy themselves as top-down thinkers. Good examples and code exercises can create the conditions in which abstract knowledge can be learned. This is a sturdy pedagogical pattern.

Concepts and Patterns

There is so, so much to CSS! HTML itself has a lot of details for new coders to master before they reach fluency. Many of the websites aimed at teaching and presenting these topics quickly begin to feel like a downpour of information, even when the authors try to organize it all. It's too easy to fall into, "And then there's this other property...".

After a few weeks, I've settled into trying to help students learn two kinds of things for each topic:

• a couple of basic concepts or principles
• a few helpful patterns

My challenge is that I am still new enough to modern web design that identifying either in advance is a challenge. My understanding is constantly evolving, so my examples and notes are evolving, too. I will be better next time, or so I hope.

~~~~~

We are only five weeks into a fifteen week semester, so take any conclusions I draw with a grain of salt. We also haven't gotten to JavaScript yet, the teaching and learning of which will present a different sort of challenge than HTML and CSS with students who have little or no experience programming. Maybe I will make time to write up our experiences with JavaScript in a few weeks.