Duke University — Programming Foundations with JavaScript, HTML and CSS — Course Review

The course Programming Foundations with JavaScript, HTML and CSS which is offered by Duke University is a fantastic course. This course is the first course in a five course series in order to obtain a “Specialization in Java Programming and Software Engineering Fundamentals”. As far as an introductory course goes, it did its job and then some. This course begins with teaching the student the basics of computer science while using codepen in order to help solidify this understanding through the use of HTML and CSS. It is quite inspiring to be able to have a visual of how far you have come from the beginning of this course to where you are now. The use of codepen in this course has provided an excellent interactive method for learning this course and providing confidence in your ability to design web applications.

Week One: In this week you learn the basics of computer science, nesting practices, HTML usage and CSS. You are asked to create an account in codepen, which you can link to your Github account. You are shown the basics of how to write text into a webpage, set up divs, headers and paragraph text. As the week progresses you are given different “Reading assignments” which ask that you implement what you were just taught in an interesting and unique method. After the week ends, you are given the opportunity to show your fully designed and functional website to your fellow classmates.

For more information on week one, please check out my blog dedicated solely to this week by clicking here.

Week Two: This week focused on JavaScript. The students learned how to declare variables and set up usages for them, such as “x + y = z => print(z);”. We learned of non algebraic variable declarations, such as: y = y + 1;. The instructors showed how to reference an image and print it. We then learned how to update the image by changing the RGB values in the image to either darken, lighten or tint the image. The week ended with requesting that the students nest an if loop inside a for loop to create a frame around the image by turning the outer pixels to black.

For more information on week two, please check out my blog dedicated solely to this week by clicking here.

Week Three: This week was dedicated to combining all previous knowledge into one. We were now supposed to add our JavaScript knowledge to a webpage designed with HTML and CSS. We learned how to…