Website Presentations and Quakebot Review

Website demos

The in-class presentation of your website will be factored into the overall grade for Project 1.

Today we'll present our completed portfolio websites. The presentation should include:

• A demo of the key features
• A discussion of what went well and what proved difficult
• Mention of features or design elements that were left on the cutting room floor (and why)
• Thoughts on how well the design hews to the 4 principles of Design Thinking and areas for future improvement

Quakebot review

We'll review solutions to the quakebot assignment, which involved writing a Jinja template to generate an automated story from USGS earthquake data.

Assignments

No new graded assignments. But please make sure you've worked through the basics of Javascript (see below for details).

Javascript crash course

This is not a graded assignment, but if you're rusty or new to Javascript, you should work through these fundamentals. Upcoming class exercises and assignments will take this knowledge for granted.

Javascript is a critical skill for building news applications, as it's the base language for adding interactivity to web pages and building dynamic, data-driven visualizations. You don't need to master JS to begin using the language. But it's a good idea to gain some ambient awareness of core JS language features so you have a sense of what's possible and where to refresh on syntax as you begin coding real-world projects. The goal is to begin laying a foundation of Javascript knowledge that you can incrementally refine and expand, rather than copy/pasting code dug up from the Internet.

A good place to begin learning (or brushing up on) Javascript is the W3C Javascript tutorial. To gain the best overall sense of Javascript's features, I'd encourage you to read and work through the code examples in the introductory section (JS Home through JS Mistakes). Warning: this is a LOT of work.

For those crunched on time, at least skim through the below sections. We'll spend time reinforcing these fundamentals through class exercises and homework assignments.

• JS HOME through JS Objects
• JS Strings and JS String methods
• JS Arrays, array methods, array iteration
• for loops
• Comparisons
• Conditional statements

Some key skills you'll be expected to be familiar with:

• Embedding JS code in an HTML page and using an external JS file
• How to output variables in the console of the browser developer toolbar
• Working with strings, numbers, objects and arrays
• Creating and using functions
• Looping and conditional statements

The above represents a solid subset of language features and skills that should help you begin reading and writing Javascript.

Other resources

If you prefer a more human-friendly (though verbose) introduction, you might also want to check out Learn Enough Javascript to Be Dangerous. To get started, just work through Section 5.4 - Iteration for each, focusing exclusively on the use of JS examples in a browser.

Lastly, this JS cheatsheet is also quite handy.