Learning web development

Abstract

Web development can provide a rich context for exploring computer science concepts and practicing computational creativity. However, little is known about the experiences that people have when first learning web development. In this paper, we investigate the help-seeking activity of forty-nine students in an introductory web development course. By applying content analysis to the help forums of the course, we characterize the challenges they encountered and sought help for, relating them to development, instruction, technology, content, and design issues. We apply a second level of content analysis to the development issues, identifying aspects of learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that challenged students most often. Finally, we identify several computational concepts that relate to these challenges, including notation, hierarchies and paths, nesting, parameters and arguments, and decomposition and abstraction. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our findings for computing education.

Development of Concept-Based XHTML/CSS Pedagogy for Non-Technical Learners

“…HTML syntax was the most common area of student misunderstanding during the study (HSYN=13%-see Figure 9), a result which mirrored the findings of Wiedenbeck (2011) andBlackwell (2002) on students' difficulty with HTML basics. Park and Wiedenbeck's (2011) conclusion was also that students need sufficient time:…”

“…Finding such a complex environment that is conducive to the needs of the learner is often difficult" (Newby et al, 2006, p. 37). Employing authentic, constructivist activities during Web design instruction for example, increases the complexity of the course (Park & Wiedenbeck, 2011).…”

“…In addition to the term Web design, the various fields employ phrases such as Web composition (Karper, 2004;Turnley, 2005), Web authoring (Niess, Lee, & Kajder, 2008;Turnley, 2005), Web literacy (Karper, 2004;Mackey & Ho, 2005;Maddux et al, 2008), Internet literacy (Hofstetter, 2006), Web development (Blackwell, 2002;Park & Wiedenbeck, 2011), Web engineering (Whitehead, 2002), hypermedia design (Lim et al, 2003), and hypertext authoring (Gordon, 2005)-all ultimately refer to the creation and posting of Web pages.…”

“…And, the practice of coding itself requires extensive accuracy, a difficulty for students that lack attention to detail (Karper, 2004). Students frequently make HTML syntax errors or typos, because they are not used to focusing on very small portions of inflexible computer language code (Park & Wiedenbeck, 2011;Voegele, 2006) and because they have difficulty seeing their own coding mistakes (Park et al, 2013, Stepp et al, 2009). In addition, Web design students may not recognize the semantic difference between display markup languages like HTML, and Web programming languages like PHP: "To the novice… such differences must be made explicit, and conveying these differences is key not only to the novice's understanding of what kind of thing HTML is, but to reducing what might be called code anxiety" (Gordon, 2005, p. 60; see also Blackwell, 2002).…”

“…Table 2), the study revealed only minimal prior consideration of the nature of computer functionality. The participants lacked an effective 'model of computers' on which to build their conceptual understanding, and this lack of a model has been found to be "a serious obstacle to learning" computer topics (Ben-Ari, 1998, p. 259; see also Park & Wiedenbeck, 2011).…”