Web Development for Beginners - A Curriculum

Azure Cloud Advocates at Microsoft are pleased to offer a 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum all about JavaScript, CSS, and HTML basics. Each lesson includes pre- and post-lesson quizzes, written instructions to complete the lesson, a solution, an assignment and more. Our project-based pedagogy allows you to learn while building, a proven way for new skills to 'stick'.

Hearty thanks to our authors Jen Looper, Chris Noring, Christopher Harrison, Jasmine Greenaway, Yohan Lasorsa, Floor Drees, and sketchnote artist Tomomi Imura!

Are you a student?

Get started with the following resources:

• Student Hub page In this page, you will find beginner resources, Student packs and even ways to get a free cert voucher. This is the page you want to bookmark and check from time to time as we switch out content monthly.
• Microsoft Student Learn ambassadors Join a global community of student ambassadors. This could be your way into Microsoft

Getting Started

Teachers, we have included some suggestions on how to use this curriculum. We'd love your feedback in our discussion forum!

Students, to use this curriculum on your own, fork the entire repo and complete the exercises on your own, starting with a pre-lecture quiz, then reading the lecture and completing the rest of the activities. Try to create the projects by comprehending the lessons rather than copying the solution code; however, that code is available in the /solutions folders in each project-oriented lesson. Another idea would be to form a study group with friends and go through the content together. For further study, we recommend Microsoft Learn and by watching the videos mentioned below.

Gif by Mohit Jaisal

🎥 Click the image above for a video about the project and the folks who created it!

Pedagogy

We have chosen two pedagogical tenets while building this curriculum: ensuring that it is project-based and that it includes frequent quizzes. By the end of this series, students will have built a typing game, a virtual terrarium, a 'green' browser extension, a 'space invaders' type game, and a business-type banking app, and will have also learned the basics of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS along with the modern toolchain of today's web developer.

🎓 You can take the first few lessons in this curriculum as a Learn Path on Microsoft Learn!

By ensuring that the content aligns with projects, the process is made more engaging for students and retention of concepts will be augmented. We also wrote several starter lessons in JavaScript basics to introduce concepts, paired with a video from the "Beginners Series to: JavaScript" collection of video tutorials, some of whose authors contributed to this curriculum.

In addition, a low-stakes quiz before a class sets the intention of the student towards learning a topic, while a second quiz after class ensures further retention. This curriculum was designed to be flexible and fun and can be taken in whole or in part. The projects start small and become increasingly complex by the end of the 12 week cycle.

While we have purposefully avoided introducing JavaScript frameworks so as to concentrate on the basic skills needed as a web developer before adopting a framework, a good next step to completing this curriculum would be learning about Node.js via another collection of videos: "Beginner Series to: Node.js".

Find our Code of Conduct, Contributing, and Translation guidelines. We welcome your constructive feedback!

Each lesson includes:

• optional sketchnote
• optional supplemental video
• pre-lesson warmup quiz
• written lesson
• for project-based lessons, step-by-step guides on how to build the project
• knowledge checks
• a challenge
• supplemental reading
• assignment
• post-lesson quiz

A note about quizzes: All quizzes are contained in this app, for 48 total quizzes of three questions each. They are linked from within the lessons but the quiz app can be run locally; follow the instruction in the quiz-app folder. They are gradually being localized.

Lessons

	Project Name	Concepts Taught	Learning Objectives	Linked Lesson	Author
01	Getting Started	Introduction to Programming and Tools of the Trade	Learn the basic underpinnings behind most programming languages and about software that helps professional developers do their jobs	Intro to Programming Languages and Tools of the Trade	Jasmine
02	Getting Started	Basics of GitHub, includes working with a team	How to use GitHub in your project, how to collaborate with others on a code base	Intro to GitHub	Floor
03	Getting Started	Accessibility	Learn the basics of web accessibility	Accessibility Fundamentals	Christopher
04	JS Basics	JavaScript Data Types	The basics of JavaScript data types	Data Types	Jasmine
05	JS Basics	Functions and Methods	Learn about functions and methods to manage an application's logic flow	Functions and Methods	Jasmine and Christopher
06	JS Basics	Making Decisions with JS	Learn how to create conditions in your code using decision-making methods	Making Decisions