At the beginning of the course, I had some expectations on what I should or will study as I have self-taught myself the basics of HTML and CSS. I was quite excited to take the course as my trivial knowledge of web design would give me a big picture of how the course would go and be of help in the early weeks as I would have had a small head start. Looking back, I feel that I have learnt many things about web design, both the coding and overall approach as well as how web development is in the industry.
Students were asked to choose their topic at the beginning of the course. Thus, I decided to create a personal website so I would be motivated enough to maintain it in the future and use it as an e-portfolio once I garner experience and internships. Through the first few weeks, I studied the basics of HTML and CSS which at the time I had already learned. Therefore, assignment part 1 was not that difficult for me as the expectations of the submitted website were clear and my previous knowledge in HTML and CSS helped.
The second third of the semester was where I had to learn more advanced CSS rules as well as incorporate some JavaScript as it was required for the second part of the assignment. Learning JavaScript to create a photo gallery was arguably the most difficult part of assignment part 2. It required extensive research on the basics of JavaScript and references on other websites. Unfortunately, the course did not teach much JavaScript during the labs and students were referred to online resources most of the time. Though I had expected to do some self-research, doing so for a major part of the marking rubric was quite stressful. However, I managed to incorporate some JavaScript and tried to learn as much as I could by changing the code and seeing how it would change the behaviour of the website. Though I wish I could have had more time to fix some bugs in my JavaScript, the process of learning JavaScript was quite fun and fulfilling.
In the last third of the semester, students were asked to improve their website, future-proof it, and were given the freedom to do something 'original'. Overall, learning web development through this course has been a fun experience and has made me interested in learning it deeper.