Web Programming

The World-Wide Web is a set of computer technologies that publish and view information over the Internet in a highly interactive manner.

This information, commonly text, graphics, and audio, is structured using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), styled using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and made dynamic and interactive using the programming language JavaScript. Together these three technologies are known as Dynamic HTML (DHTML).

Additional technologies can be used with HTML, such as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for displaying geometric shapes (similar to Adobe Illustrator).

This course includes examples of applying JavaScript to various other web technologies through their application programming interfaces (API) , for example the popular jQuery library that simplifies the manipulation of web pages, the React application framework, and the MongoDB database.

Because of the spatial nature of web pages, where text, images, and videos are arranged in relation to each other in a two-dimensional layered document, and the explicitly spatial nature of SVG, this is not just an introduction to a very important use of computing technology, it’s also a great introductory course in programming. Research has shown that spatial skills facilitate general programming skills and understanding, by helping develop strategies that extend to the latter’s pseudo-spatial nature. A recent article in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery notes that “[i]n studies of computer graphics modules, where the subject matter of the module is much more closely tied to spatial skills, multiple aspects of spatial skills (particularly visualization and encoding) correlated with module grades”.