Intersession

Editors & Editing for Kids

The question of an editor. While we stay in guided environments like jsbin & mistakes.io for the first two days of class, in order to save to files and tinker, we eventually need to ‘save to disk’ to view things as real websites and understand how code works.

I use vim personally, but know very well that it’s a tough place to start for students, and would be a dangerous distraction from the topics. I considered GitHub Atom for the editor, but realized that

  1. It may not be free after the beta program
  2. I’d have to distribute a bootlegged .zip file
  3. A friend or two on twitter has seen it crash often.

Thus I went for the other default, Sublime Text. This has a few drawbacks that show up in class:

  1. The strategy of editing, then saving, then clicking on the browser and hitting command-r, is slow and error-prone.
  2. The Sublime Text nag menu on Save is disruptive and annoying.

I considered, but didn’t used, TextWrangler, which would probably be a better ‘simple’ option, and brackets, which is a little shiny and untested, but has the huge benefit of ‘live editing mode’.

On that topic: I set up the basic

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

on each computer, but this is more or less magic to the kids and they certainly wouldn’t be able to do this at home. I couldn’t find another server for OSX that was free & simple. Even just a wrapper for this might be great.

Welcome to Intersession

Some notes on the first day and a half:

  • CSS is harder to understand than inline styles: I’m not sure if we should have taught inline styles first.
  • A lot of this is just typing accuracy: getting the { and } in the right places. This disadvantages kids with less typing proficiency and makes it harder to teach topics.
  • A few things that have been hard to explain: span and div elements. URLs. Proper names.

Sarah had the great idea of making ‘review’ exercises that reiterate combinations of the facts that we learn.

  • Afternoons are hard for kids - they burn out quickly.