[thelist] Info for High School Students

[Ray Hill]

I realize this response is probably too late to help with 
kathy's presentation, but since I didn't see anything in 
the thread about what I believe is the most important 
element, I'm going to throw in my belated two cents worth.


Maybe it's the suppressed history teacher in me speaking, 
but I think the first thing you have to conquer in any 
high school class is the "how does this apply to the real 
world" question that students subconsciously apply to every 
class (come on, you remember asking yourseklf that question 
in Algebra class, don't you??).

There are also likely to be a decent number of students into 
the class who are not planning on becoming programmers or 
web designers.  So in order for the class to be informative 
to them, you have to overcome their tendency to tune out 
anything that sounds overly technical.

The best way to accomplish both of these tasks is to 
inject a heavy dose of metaphor into your lesson.  The 
most convenient metaphor for web design, I'd say, is 
architecture, and the building of a house.

In web development, you've got the visual designers, the 
application engineers, the back-end programmers, the content 
specialists, etc  all working together to produce a finished 
web site.  That might be a bit difficult for a non-geek 
student to understand, until you compare it to the architect, 
construction workers, city planner, and interior designers 
all working together to produce a finished house.

If a student in the back says that you don't really need 
to know how to hand-code because his cousin Vinny got a 
job paying $50K/year when he only knew how ot use FrontPage, 
explain to him that during the gold rush anyone who could 
lift a hammer could get a construction job, but only the 
*real* carpenters still had jobs two years later (possibily 
leading into a dot com layoff discussion).

As was mentioned before, concentrate more on the concepts 
behind the evolution of the web, and where the technologies 
(HTML, JavaScript, server-side scripting) fit into the long-
term scheme of things.  If you just teach them the facts that 
apply today, that will be useless to them in six months or 
a year.  If you give them a decent understanding of the 
underlying concepts, they can continue to teach themselves 
the changing details through books and web sites (like the 
rest fo us) instead fo being confused as to why "real" web 
developers are looking down their nose at what they were 
taught in class six months ago.

Most importantly, though, try to keep your audience in mind.  
If it's a class that's made up purely of people who want to 
be there, and are interested in web development as a career, 
go full boar into the professional side of things.  If only 
a small percentage are interested in doing it as a career, 
and the majority just want to have a general understanding, 
make it a broader focus.  Going back to the metaphor, if 
you've got a class full of hopeful architects, make it a 
high-level theory class; if you've got a bunch of do-it-
yourself handymen who just want to know how to build a dog 
house or tree house (ie, personal web site), make it a more 
low-level step-by-step focus.


In my experience with training phone agents and doing a 
few guest lectures in high schools, I can tell you that 
the minute the student decides you're boring or that what 
you're teaching doesn't apply to them, you've lost them 
for good.  Keep it vaguely interesting and remotely relevant 
to them, and they may accidentally learn something.  :)



--ray