Online School Resumes with Meteor

As you may know, I’ve been teaching a web programming course this year. I wrote previously about the work we did at the beginning of the year making interactive websites using the Meteor framework. Since then, we’ve spent time exploring the use of templates, event handlers, databases, and routing to build single page applications.

The latest assignment I gave students was to create an online school resume site with a working guestbook. I frequently discuss the importance of having a positive digital footprint online, and one of the most beneficial ways of establishing this is through a site created to share their work. Students worked last week to complete this and submitted their projects. We’ve had connectivity issues to the Meteor servers from China from school. As a result, some students used Meteorpad, which unfortunately means their sites aren’t permanent.

Those that were successful at deploying, however, have persistent guestbooks that anyone can visit and comment upon. Some students added secret pages or like buttons to show that they have learned how to use the reactive features of Meteor. The students were excited when I said I would post links on my blog and have given me permission to share. Here is the set of deployed sites:

Maria’s Site
Dominick’s Site
Tanay’s Site
Luke’s Site
Steven’s Site
Tiffany’s Site

I’m really proud of how far these students have come since the beginning of the year. They have accrued some bad habits of copying code and avoiding commenting their Javascript, but I take some responsibility for not holding them accountable for this. My goal was to have the focus of this course be on building and creating as the first priority, and the second on developing skills as programmers. As with many of the subjects I teach, helping students see the need for the basics is often most easily done with the end product in mind.

If anyone wants recommendations for a summer hire, let me know.