Let’s Cook!

I’ve been a volunteer at our school code club for a few months now, and one of the things I never thought I’d do would be to stand up in front of the whole class, and teach them some stuff. I’ve seen Amanda do it lots of times – she’s a natural; and watched Jas talk so fluently to the kids, that I really didn’t ever envisage having the confidence to try.

But then a week ago, there was a suggestion that we needed a bit of an injection of something new, having been Scratching away since we began. And as I am a web developer, and spend my day writing HTML (as well as CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, and a few other acronyms that slip my mind), all eyes turned on me.

I have an unfortunate habit recently of putting my hand up for things – which is how I got into this in the first place. I’m involved with my local parkrun, I look after the website for our local football team – and now it seems, I am a teacher – albeit qualified at the Heath Robinson institute. Before the session began, Amanda told me to remember that the kids are keen to learn – and it was reassuring to see them all bouncing around excitedly, looking forward to getting the info out of me!

HTML has the potential to be a very dry subject. On a basic level, it’s a set of instructions that tell a web browser how to display some data. Having seen the kids explore coding over the last few months, it’s clear they get a kick out of going off-script – so I also needed to give them the opportunity to do that.

The project that I came up with was called “Let’s Cook, Mr Lawson”. I wanted to find a way to explain what HTML does – and so I started by writing it like this on the board:

lets cook mr lawson

The idea is that a single comma can change the meaning of a sentence. And we followed this up by finding all the other missing bits of punctuation that help us fully understand what the author of the sentence means. And from there, I had a platform to explain that HTML works in a similar way.

Having talked about cooking teachers, I asked the class to build me a recipe of their choice, with a worksheet showing them how to insert titles, paragraphs, lists and images. I encouraged them to come up with fun ingredients and cooking methods, giving them examples such as ‘cough mixture’ and ‘spider vomit’.

Rather than use an online tool (like Trinket), which gives you one panel for source code, and another one to see your output, I encouraged the children to use Notepad and a browser side by side. This is how I learned HTML – and although there are plenty of tools that will auto-complete your tags, I think it’s important to have it ingrained. It’s also easier when it comes to teaching them how to include images, and build up a set of files for their web pages. Showing them how to save files with a HTML rather than TXT extension was a bit traumatic at first, but then there was a glorious moment where they all seemed to get going.

I came away with a smile and a bit of a buzz – already excited about how I could extend the project and retain their interest in future weeks. Let’s cook, class!