Crossing the line
Students' web work
UX Q & A
Pencils to pixels
Hello there, you.
D.I.Y.
January, 2011

Examples of students' work

From Intermediate Computers course I taught at Tyler School of Art

Below are websites developed by my students in the Fall of 2010 when I taught Intermediate Computers at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. This is a required course for juniors majoring in graphic and interactive design.

The course involved teaching the Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and Dreamweaver) through the design of a logo, a printed catalog and a website. The logo and print portions of the class were scripted, but the interactive portion of was completely open to the instructor's discretion.

Because HTML and CSS are necessities for website design, I taught the interactive portion through basic HTML and CSS coding, using Dreamweaver as an interface to access the code. The time allotted in the course for the students to design and learn to code their websites was only six weeks, so there are a few errors in these final websites that the students did not have time to resolve before the end of the semester.

Considering that these students had never coded before and were very intimidated by this portion of the class, I considered it a huge success that by the end of the course all of the students were debugging their sites through HTML and CSS. Many students later told me that they helped students from other classes debug their websites as well. One student even developed such a strong interest that she hand coded her entire site. Quite a few other students also expressed interest in continuing to expand their coding skills beyond what they learned in the course.

The studio courses at Tyler are very hands on, and involve a good deal of creative interaction between student and teacher. Each class runs five hours (or 2.5 hours, twice per week), which allowed me time in class to work with students one-on-one to help them troubleshoot their code. Additionally, I offered time before and after each class to assist students who needed extra help. Most of my students worked very hard, and a few even found the time to attend the extra weekend sessions that I offered.

In summary, in six weeks we barely scratched the surface of what these students were capable of. That said, in six weeks, these kids did some awesome beginner work. You can access the full websites below in their hacked-up glory. mt