Assignment 3: <script>
In Assignment #1, you created 10 hyperlinked text-only web pages which described a journey from your room to our classroom, stopping 10 times en route. In Assignment #2, you chose one of those places and added 100 images. Now, working from the place you chose in Assignment #2, add an action — something specific you can do at that place. For example, you might have chosen Coffee Club as your place. Now add an action, such as “order a coffee” or “see a menu” or something less direct, “coffee leaderboard” or “how to make a lavender oat milk three-shot latte” or even less direct like “how to meet someone at Coffee Club” or “reserve the best seat to drink coffee and study.” These are all actions. Choose one and design a website that will facilitate, allow, represent, or communicate that action.
Design and program a website which combines one place on campus and one action that can happen there.The <script> tag is used to include client-side scripts on a webpage. This makes it possible for a web page to *do* something. You will remember (from this class) that Netscape introduced javascript as a browser scripting extension in 1995. It was a radical addition at the time, and a re-conceptualization of a web page from representing something to doing something. Javascript pretty soon caught fire (particularly with the emergence of Web 2.0 and web apps). Now, it is hard to think about the world wide web without the built-in logic of javascript which runs everything from Google Maps to Browser Pong.
In Assignment #1, you created 10 hyperlinked text-only web pages which described a journey from your room to our classroom, stopping 10 times en route. In Assignment #2, you chose one of those places and added 100 images. Now, working from the place you chose in Assignment #2, add an action — something specific you can do at that place. For example, you might have chosen Coffee Club as your place. Now add an action, such as “order a coffee” or “see a menu” or something less direct, “coffee leaderboard” or “how to make a lavender oat milk three-shot latte” or even less direct like “how to meet someone at Coffee Club” or “reserve the best seat to drink coffee and study.” These are all actions. Choose one and design a website that will facilitate, allow, represent, or communicate that action.
Week 1: Go to the place on campus you have selected. Sit. Look. Take notes. Think. Sketch. Reconsider. Bring 10 sketches on 8.5 x 11-inch paper to class, each of which describes a discrete design idea.
Week 2: Based on feedback, choose one idea to develop. Ask yourself how your website can make the action possible. Will it be a web app? Will it be a set of instructions? Will it be user-generated content? What will happen in 2 weeks? What will it be like in 9 weeks? 9 months? 9 years? etc.
Week 3: Begin coding.
Week 4: Based on feedback, refine your design, continue coding.
Week 5: Present your work.The goal is to learn some more HTML, some more CSS, and finally, some Javascript (!) to think about how you can program a website to *do* something. Javascript was written in two weeks and you have five weeks, so get busy!