Discussion on: Where Does Everybody Begin Programming?

Hi, Matt. We see that you are a teacher! Thank you for your service!!!

So, - it's always a work in progress... but we suggest that our students read "Don't Make Me Think" - before learning any HTML. We also talk about human memory and explore how we break down information. It's mostly subconscious - but it's key: value pairs.

"One day I went to the store to buy salsa" is a piece of content.

If you were to describe this piece of content (to the computer), how would you do it?

We force the students to think as if they were a markup language designer. That leads to a bunch of funny ideas. Sometimes they make up something just like "markdown."

Eventually - they all come to the conclusion that you need a "start" and an "end" to describe something. That's the same with every language.

CONCEPT { // start
    // description 
} // end

At that point / we're also talking about those key: value pairs.

dev.to/perpetual_edu/baby-talk-for...

ELEMENT
  - type = "paragraph"
  - content = "One day I went to the store..."

HTML is a language that is easy to pickup (by design) but it's also easy to emulate and to memorize it's visual look. At it's core, it's the same as every other language. It just looks funny.

Node {
    element: "p",
    textContent: "One day I went to the store...",
    id: null,
    classes: ['calm-voice'],
    styles: [],
    dataset: {
        theme: "light",
    }
}

So - it may not be the fastest way to getting someone to "just learn how to type HTML" - but by building empathy for the user with a book like "Don't Make Me Think" - and by forcing the student to imagine creating their own language: we seem to be able to power through CSS, PHP, and JavaScript/DOM - because they'll basically already know the foundations of those languages now.

That's what is working for us so far!