zenparty.org

Earlier this month, I was asked to give a workshop to a group of graphic designers introducing them to designing with CSS. This was a unique opportunity that I jumped at. Though I work in the Writing Center at MSU and a large part of my job is giving workshops related to the writing process and composition, it’s rare that I get to do anything related to web development, let alone plan a workshop on my own.

I spent about a day planning the hour-long workshop and delivered it a week ago to 20 designers who had minimal, or in most cases, NO experience with HTML or CSS. The workshop went well overall. In fact, I’m choosing to think of this particular experience as a “pilot” workshop; I hope that I’ll have more opportunities to do this with other beginners.

My biggest challenge in planning the workshop for beginners is that I’ve been working in / writing my own CSS for more than 10 years and I did not learn to do it in a classroom! So, in some ways, I found myself at a loss for how to begin to teach CSS to beginners, because I couldn’t figure out what the most essential information was.

For help on the what, I consulted CSS tutorials on tizag.com and W3 Schools – both were very helpful and I ended up referring students to them for references. I focused on information that I thought would help the beginning coders; in this case, the syntax and structure of CSS.

In terms of how to teach CSS, I modeled my workshop after the teachers I’ve had for classes focused on technical skill. Luckily, I’ve had some excellent teachers who talk about the rationale behind the technologies, but also effectively demonstrate and model them for students. I showed what CSS actually does to a website by taking it away from a website, gave a general definition of it and introduced the syntax, and then did some actual coding in the classroom, taking requests and recommendations from students in the room on how to style heading text or images. If I were teaching my own class, I would have them following along on their own machines, however I believe that demonstrating for this workshop was still effective.

Overall, this was a really fun opportunity to teach something I love and to try on activities that I’ll likely be doing soon: lesson-planning and leading a class. I’ve included a PDF version of my presentation below.