Dearly Beloved Students:

Welcome to Introduction to Computer Programming:HTML. The overall goal of this class is to introduce students to the logical, sequential thinking that is used to program a computer to perform functions for the user. All of us are computer users. This class is the first of 3 classes that introduce us to the world of a computer programmer. It will gives us a feel for what lies behind the GUI(graphical user interface) that we all use when we write a word processing document or surf the Web. This is truly an introduction! Programming languages are many and evolve yearly. There is no one who "knows" all programming languages but any one language gives the user a feel for the processes involved in all programming languages.

HTML or Hypertext Markup Language is the backbone language of the World Wide Web. In a strict sense, it is not really a "programming" language, but requires similar thought processes to write its code as other languages do. Other programming languages, such as C++ or Basic, could have been the focus of this class. We chose HTML for several reasons:
  1. It is very inexpensive to teach. It requires only 2 pieces of software: a simple word processor and an Internet browser. Both of these are free and loaded on virtually all computers today.
  2. It is perhaps the most widely used language today considering the amount of websites that proliferate daily.
  3. It allows you to see the fruits of your labor immediately on any Internet browser. Many programmers will work on a project in C++, for example, for many weeks before seeing the end product.
  4. It is a simple language to learn in a trimester.
  5. Web design is more appealing to many students as it has a creative side to it along with the logical processes.
  6. It allows us to produce a product for our school that can be viewed by others.
  7. But most importantly: When I asked professional programmers what language we should teach high school students, they virtually all responded, "It doesn't really matter, just teach them some language".

When we designed this course, school district officials originally asked why we were teaching HTML code when there are software programs, such as FrontPage, PageMill, or even Office programs, that will automatically add the code to any document you create. That was an easy question to answer. First of all, we want to teach the language itself because we want you to experience these logical thought processes we keep referring to. Secondly, no professional web designer uses these WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get) editors without a knowledge of the underlying code because you are constantly having to dig into the code to fix a problem. Many web designers write all their pages strictly with code(yours truly, included). You have more control over the page and like any skill, it improves with practice. Thirdly, its more fun!

In our course proposal, we added what we think is a very important component of this class. This class will be in charge of adding some spice to the Park Center Web Page. The PC page is wonderful, but it needs a student perspective. You will provide that. One of the requirements of this class is that you do a webpage about an aspect of "life at Park Center". You could "do" the football team, or the ESL program, or student life, or ... . I am excited about this part of the class because it allows us to apply our knowledge and to increase student control of your school.

I truly hope you enjoy this class. It will be very hands on with little teacher talk(gotta love that!). I have found that writing web pages is something I truly enjoy doing. It allows my scientific mind to blend with my creative mind. I hope you have the same experience. Have fun and Learn HTML!

Lotsa Luck,

Rholl

Index Basic Tags Links Design Layout Tables Image File Types Using Images Image Editing Lists Frames