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Why are they most jazzed about HTML and CSS? Is it because they can create something immediate and show it to others online?

• steveklabnik 13y ago
  This is http://codenow.org/ http://codenow.org/ in NYC, by the way. The organization partners with my employer, Jumpstart Lab. This particular iteration is six weeks, all the kids did a weekend with us during the school year. Last week was reviewing very basic programming concepts in Ruby, then this week, we did ruby-processing, and then Sinatra, so the HTML came into play. I think it's because it's a more graphical medium; many of them can see how it's 'neat,' but when doing just textual stuff, they get bored easily. The processing was kinda interesting, but I think the simplicity of making something graphical was what really made them get pumped. Then, now they're more excited to learn more Ruby so that they can build more complex sites, but (at least with this group) it's a means to an end. We haven't actually deployed anything public yet, so they haven't been able to share, I bet that'll be another huge leap in interest.
  • da02 13y ago
    Thanks for the info. I wish I had this back in the 90s. Did they try Ruby Shoes (or whatever replaced it) as a fun side GUI project?
    • steveklabnik 13y ago
      Yes! Their very first lessons were with Hackety Hack, actually. They did some shoes-ing after that.
• trafficlight 13y ago
  I remember when I was 13 and first realized that I could HTML was what webpages were and that I could write it myself. It was 1997 and Geocities was my best friend. I was so excited.