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Web Development for Beginners - A Curriculum
Azure Cloud Advocates at Microsoft are pleased to offer a 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum all about JavaScript, CSS, and HTML basics. Each lesson includes pre- and post-lesson quizzes, written instructions to complete the lesson, a solution, an assignment and more. Our project-based pedagogy allows you to learn while building, a proven way for new skills to 'stick'.
Hearty thanks to our authors Jen Looper, Chris Noring, Christopher Harrison, Jasmine Greenaway, Yohan Lasorsa, Floor Drees, and sketchnote artist Tomomi Imura!
Are you a student?
Get started with the following resources:
- Student Hub page In this page, you will find beginner resources, Student packs and even ways to get a free cert voucher. This is one page you want to bookmark and check from time to time as we switch out content at least monthly.
- Microsoft Student Learn ambassadors Join a global community of student ambassadors, this could be your way into Microsoft
Getting Started
Teachers, we have included some suggestions on how to use this curriculum. We'd love your feedback in our discussion forum!
Students, to use this curriculum on your own, fork the entire repo and complete the exercises on your own, starting with a pre-lecture quiz, then reading the lecture and completing the rest of the activities. Try to create the projects by comprehending the lessons rather than copying the solution code; however, that code is available in the /solutions folders in each project-oriented lesson. Another idea would be to form a study group with friends and go through the content together. For further study, we recommend Microsoft Learn and by watching the videos mentioned below.
Gif by Mohit Jaisal
🎥 Click the image above for a video about the project and the folks who created it!
Pedagogy
We have chosen two pedagogical tenets while building this curriculum: ensuring that it is project-based and that it includes frequent quizzes. By the end of this series, students will have built a typing game, a virtual terrarium, a 'green' browser extension, a 'space invaders' type game, and a business-type banking app, and will have learned the basics of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS along with the modern toolchain of today's web developer.
🎓 You can take the first few lessons in this curriculum as a Learn Path on Microsoft Learn!
By ensuring that the content aligns with projects, the process is made more engaging for students and retention of concepts will be augmented. We also wrote several starter lessons in JavaScript basics to introduce concepts, paired with video from the "Beginners Series to: JavaScript" collection of video tutorials, some of whose authors contributed to this curriculum.
In addition, a low-stakes quiz before a class sets the intention of the student towards learning a topic, while a second quiz after class ensures further retention. This curriculum was designed to be flexible and fun and can be taken in whole or in part. The projects start small and become increasingly complex by the end of the 12 week cycle.
While we have purposefully avoided introducing JavaScript frameworks so as to concentrate on the basic skills needed as a web developer before adopting a framework, a good next step to completing this curriculum would be learning about Node.js via another collection of videos: "Beginner Series to: Node.js".
Find our Code of Conduct, Contributing, and Translation guidelines. We welcome your constructive feedback!
Each lesson includes:
- optional sketchnote
- optional supplemental video
- pre-lesson warmup quiz
- written lesson
- for project-based lessons, step-by-step guides on how to build the project
- knowledge checks
- a challenge
- supplemental reading
- assignment
- post-lesson quiz
A note about quizzes: All quizzes are contained in this app, for 48 total quizzes of three questions each. They are linked from within the lessons but the quiz app can be run locally; follow the instruction in the
quiz-appfolder. They are gradually being localized.
Lessons
| Project Name | Concepts Taught | Learning Objectives | Linked Lesson | Author | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Getting Started | Introduction to Programming and Tools of the Trade | Learn the basic underpinnings behind most programming languages and about software that helps professional developers do their jobs | Intro to Programming Languages and Tools of the Trade | Jasmine |
| 02 | Getting Started | Basics of GitHub, includes working with a team | How to use GitHub in your project, how to collaborate with others on a code base | Intro to GitHub | Floor |
| 03 | Getting Started | Accessibility | Learn the basics of web accessibility | Accessibility Fundamentals | Christopher |
| 04 | JS Basics | JavaScript Data Types | The basics of JavaScript data types | Data Types | Jasmine |
| 05 | JS Basics | Functions and Methods | Learn about functions and methods to manage an application's logic flow | Functions and Methods | Jasmine and Christopher |
| 06 | JS Basics | Making Decisions with JS | Learn how to create conditions in your code using decision-making methods | Making Decisions | Jasmine |
| 07 | JS Basics | Arrays and Loops | Work with data using arrays and loops in JavaScript | Arrays and Loops | Jasmine |
| 08 | Terrarium | HTML in Practice | Build the HTML to create an online terrarium, focusing on building a layout | Introduction to HTML | Jen |
| 09 | Terrarium | CSS in Practice | Build the CSS to style the online terrarium, focusing on the basics of CSS including making the page responsive | Introduction to CSS | Jen |
| 10 | Terrarium | JavaScript Closures, DOM manipulation | Build the JavaScript to make the terrarium function as a drag/drop interface, focusing on closures and DOM manipulation | JavaScript Closures, DOM manipulation | Jen |
| 11 | Typing Game | Build a Typing Game | Learn how to use keyboard events to drive the logic of your JavaScript app | Event-Driven Programming | Christopher |
| 12 | Green Browser Extension | Working with Browsers | Learn how browsers work, their history, and how to scaffold the first elements of a browser extension | About Browsers | Jen |
| 13 | Green Browser Extension | Building a form, calling an API and storing variables in local storage | Build the JavaScript elements of your browser extension to call an API using variables stored in local storage | APIs, Forms, and Local Storage | Jen |
| 14 | Green Browser Extension | Background processes in the browser, web performance | Use the browser's background processes to manage the extension's icon; learn about web performance and some optimizations to make | Background Tasks and Performance | Jen |
| 15 | Space Game | More Advanced Game Development with JavaScript | Learn about Inheritance using both Classes and Composition and the Pub/Sub pattern, in preparation for building a game | Introduction to Advanced Game Development | Chris |
| 16 | Space Game | Drawing to canvas | Learn about the Canvas API, used to draw elements to a screen | Drawing to Canvas | Chris |
| 17 | Space Game | Moving elements around the screen | Discover how elements can gain motion using the cartesian coordinates and the Canvas API | Moving Elements Around | Chris |
| 18 | Space Game | Collision detection | Make elements collide and react to each other using keypresses and provide a cooldown function to ensure performance of the game | Collision Detection | Chris |
| 19 | Space Game | Keeping score | Perform math calculations based on the game's status and performance | Keeping Score | Chris |
| 20 | Space Game | Ending and restarting the game | Learn about ending and restarting the game, including cleaning up assets and resetting variable values | The Ending Condition | Chris |
| 21 | Banking App | HTML Templates and Routes in a Web App | Learn how to create the scaffold of a multipage website's architecture using routing and HTML templates | HTML Templates and Routes | Yohan |
| 22 | Banking App | Build a Login and Registration Form | Learn about building forms and handing validation routines | Forms | Yohan |
| 23 | Banking App | Methods of Fetching and Using Data | How data flows in and out of your app, how to fetch it, store it, and dispose of it | Data | Yohan |
| 24 | Banking App | Concepts of State Management | Learn how your app retains state and how to manage it programmatically | State Management | Yohan |
Offline access
You can run this documentation offline by using Docsify. Fork this repo, install Docsify on your local machine, and then in the root folder of this repo, type docsify serve. The website will be served on port 3000 on your localhost: localhost:3000.
A PDF of all of the lessons can be found here
Other Curricula
Our team produces other curricula! Check out: