Lab 2 – Web Developement (Sam Merritt)

I agree with Donahue in that “students should learn to program, but they should not let their inability to program prevent them from engaging with the computer sciences.” In our modern world programming is a great skill to have no matter what field you are in and it will only get more useful. However, it seems to me that there are many second level programs where you do not have to build a project from square one. For example instead of coding your own webpage like the example below, it much easier and requires less instruction to use a site such as google sites or square space to make a website.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
This is my first web page
</body>
</html>

So yes, whether or not you are a chemist or a historian coding is useful. But unless you are going into something like computer science, it does not seem like a prerequisite.

I took a computer science course in high school but after doing this activity I felt like I hadn’t. I was very lost and I felt like I was missing a lot of information that the program seemed to think was common sense. Even an instruction as easy as “Open a web browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer and in the address bar, where you usually type web addresses, type in the location of the file you just saved (for example, “c:\html\myfirstpage.html”) and hit return” took me awhile to figure out. This might seem like a ridiculously easy and basic instruction for some people but I felt like I was missing basic information on how websites work. I wasn’t very good at coding in the high school class either. Things that seem intuitive to other people I have a very hard time figuring out.