Have you been trying any of the weekly Coding at Home activities? I’ll admit, stay-at-home schooling has taken up a way bigger chunk of the day that we had expected when we started this new normal thing. This weekend we made a point of trying one of the longer projects, and I think it’s one that everyone can have some fun with.
Girls Who Code has made these projects available for everyone, so you don’t even need to log into your HQ.GirlsWhoCode account. Start out at the Coding at Home page, and scroll down until you see this:
During uncertain times, it’s important to take a break to focus on and share something that brings you joy! Learn how to use HTML and CSS to build a tutorial that teaches someone how to do something like how to make a TikTok, how to draw a cat, how to make your favorite cookies (our project was making homemade granola), how to land a perfect water bottle flip – no skill is too small!
Here’s a run-down of the project:
- Brainstorm you project. Think of a skill that you want to share, and how you want to explain it. Maybe it’s just a list, maybe you need lots of pictures. Are there supplies needed? What kind of preparation do you need, both to explain the project and to follow the instructions?
- Open a project in Glitch. Take a few minutes to read their getting started page. Then open a “new project,” select “Hello, Webpage,” and check out the README.md file. Glitch is a powerful tool for collaborative app development, but all you really need to know right now is that it lets you live-preview your work as you code. As you add HTML elements, they just show up in a preview window.
- Intro to HTML. Just follow the steps in the GWC tutorial. Keep it simple. Play around by copy/pasting some text in the existing HTML tags, then changing the tags
- Intro to CSS. Again, keep it simple. For a starter project, just play around with changing colors and maybe fonts. The project page shows links to W3Schools and Mozilla, but for this week I’d recommend just sticking with the examples on the GWC tutorial.
Here’s what we built this weekend: a recipe page for our award-winning homemade granola.
Like I just said, we kept it simple … very simple. On the HTML side, it’s just paragraphs and unordered lists, and the CSS only changes the background and font colors. The plan is to continue styling it over the next few weeks, add pictures to demonstrate the steps, and then move on to learning about page layouts.
If you want to give it a shot but need help getting started, then give us a shout on Teams. Look up Hope in the directory and we can go over some common stumbling blocks.
And, hey, if you don’t have time to try this yourself … well, then just enjoy the granola!
Poudre Coding Club 
