Make Your Own App (edX)

Using motivational videos, introductory sections, an interactive code editor, challenges and peer review throughout this course you will develop a working chat app. While doing so you can earn credits and points, receive badges and fulfill achievements in order to be able to see and compare your progress with other students. Starting with simple HTML content and ordinary CSS rules you will gradually improve your app and add increasing interaction within every week using JavaScript and JQuery. After completing this course you’ll be able to tackle almost any idea you might have and build an app that fulfills your needs.

What you'll learn

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript basics
• How to structure HTML code, including media elements, referencing external resources and separate CSS styles from HTML code
• How to make web apps interactive
• How to use advanced CSS properties to create captivating apps and understand and apply basic programming concepts like loops and arrays
• Advanced JavaScript concepts and a basic introduction to web-APIs, JSON and AJAX

Course Syllabus

Topics

· HTML
o Notation, concept, structure
o Best practices, coding conventions
o Input, media, content elements
o Classes, IDs, addressing elements

· CSS
o Notation, concept, structure
o Best practices, coding conventions
o Inline styles
o Separate style sheets
o Key-value pairs
o Colors, backgrounds, fonts, shadows, borders…
o Box model, different box-styles and their properties
o Positioning, aligning
o Pseudo-Elements

· JavaScript
o Notation, concept, structure
o Best practices, coding conventions
o Manipulate HTML
o JQuery
o Functions, variables, operators
o Constructors
o Data-Structures
o Conditional expressions, loops
o This, callbacks, event methods

Week 1
We provide an instruction to the notation and concept of the Hyper-Text-Markup-Language (HTML) and teach you the basics of CSS allowing you to adapt the style and appearance of your HTML code.

Week 2
We educate you on structuring HTML code, including media elements, referencing external resources and teach you how to separate CSS styles from HTML code, continue styling your code and learn more about the box model, since your code has become more mature.

Week 3
We deepen your understanding of HTML and CSS by applying advanced properties and lay the foundation for the following sections by introducing JavaScript.

Week 4
We will teach you how to make web apps interactive. We will dive deeper into JavaScript and its mechanisms and introduce advanced debugging tools as well as JQuery.

Week 5
This week you will learn how to use advanced CSS properties to let the application appear captivating and get to understand and apply basic programming concepts like loops and arrays.

Week 6
We will improve the apps performance by applying advanced JavaScript concepts and give you a basic introduction to web-APIs, JSON and AJAX.

Exercises
Each week includes several problems that you should solve, including quizzes as well as a peer review challenge you should solve and will then grade four of your fellow learners.
Additionally, you will have to write source code in the three languages covered in an interactive code editor that provides you with instant feedback and enables you to earn several badges and achievements.