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New Comers Learn

NOTE: This project has been retired.

Introduction

What on earth is New Comers Learn (NCL)? This is a simple idea for an open source layout of a course to get people who can program, but perhaps not as well as hoped, to a better level through self learning. Here I plan to list a series of tasks that may help complete this goal. This is of course an on-going task, so expect this to be incomplete and added to at a later date.

Website

Description

The first task of many will be to build a simple website following reasonably good practices. The reason for doing this is to work on something that has direct visual output and to act as a core task to fuel other tasks. The success of the entire project depends on the site being something that the person wants to learn, so it’s important they are happy with the results and feel it is of their creation.

This works best if the solution is hosted online as this means they have something to show to the important people of their lives. It reinforces the positive attitude towards the task - because people who’s opinion they respect can positively comment on their work, they feel more inclined to work on it.

With help, once a simple site is constructed provide feedback to improve it showing tools that help make this process possible, such as in browser “inspection”.

Task

Build a simple site that contains the following pages (more can be added later):

  • Home - A page that welcomes your visitors.
  • Blogs - A page that shows the blogs.
  • About - A page that describes you.

Breakdown of steps to achieve this task:

  1. Research existing blogs and create bullet points about what it is you like and don’t like about them.
  2. Design your layout, including how the pages will navigate and what content is expected to be on the pages. Keeping this as simple as possible is key at this point, complexity can be added later.
  3. Design the lower levels of your page. The structure should be so that content is stored in HTML with limited structural elements and design should be stored in CSS. Javascript should be avoid for now.
  4. Program! Time to put this together. When searching for how to do parts, try only to look at how a particular line is done and not copy large sections of code from online. It’s important for knowing exactly what each line contribute to the site.

First Blog

Description

A simple blog to be added to the blogs section of the site where they explain exactly how the site was created. This sets a good pattern of doing development work and reflecting on it afterwards. This also helps generate content for the site, encouraging continuous improvement on it.

Task

Write a blog on how you built this site. It must include the following materials but more is better than less:

  • Research - Include information about the research you did before building the site and what it is you finally decided from it. Indicate parts that are yet to be developed.
  • Images - These should include images that demonstrate the site layout, show the layout chosen and graphics uses and why.
  • Code - Give examples of the code you wrote and why it was written in that way.

NOTE: More to come at a later date.