From Building Web Pages to Powering Web Apps: What Our Coding Students Are Learning

Our coding students are off to a great start this year, and each class is building important skills that will prepare them for real-world technology careers. Year 1: Building the Foundation with HTML Year 1 students are currently mastering HTML, the language used to organize and structure the content of a webpage. Think of HTML as the framework or skeleton of a house. It tells a website where the headings, paragraphs, images, links, buttons, and other pieces of content belong. Students are learning how to create webpages from the ground up and understand how websites are organized behind the scenes. Soon, students will begin learning CSS, which is used to control how a webpage looks. If HTML is the structure of the house, CSS is the paint, furniture, lighting, and design that makes the house visually appealing. Students will learn how to work with colors, fonts, spacing, layouts, and responsive designs that work across different screen sizes. Year 2: Going Behind the Scenes with NodeJS While Year 1 is focused on building the visible side of websites, Year 2 students are taking their skills to the next level by learning backend development with NodeJS. The backend is the part of an application that users don't normally see. It handles the behind-the-scenes work—such as processing information, communicating with databases, managing user requests, and sending information back to the website. A simple way to think about it is a restaurant: the website is the dining room where customers interact with the menu, while the backend is the kitchen where the actual work happens behind the scenes. With NodeJS, our Year 2 students are learning how to build those behind-the-scenes systems and connect them to the websites and applications they create. From designing webpages in Year 1 to building the technology that powers applications in Year 2, our students are developing skills step-by-step and gaining a better understanding of how modern websites and applications actually work.