State of Webcraft: Webmaking 101

NOTE: We need your help, find ways to get involved at the end of this post.

It's been an exciting great year for School of Webcraft. Starting with Mashing Up the Open Web the community has rallied to offer over twenty different courses ranging from Ruby on Rails to HTML5. We have shown that there is demand for a better way to learn web development. Thousands have joined courses and we've heard many interesting success stories. We've learned a ton from our experience and are kicking into high gear with a revised plan.

School of Webcraft started as an experiment, we tested our ideas and learned from mistakes. Drawing from our experience we've decided to refine our offer and ask with the goal of lowering the barrier to entry. We want to make it immediately clear how Webcraft works and get people started without a huge time commitment.

THE OFFER
Learn web development by completing challenges. Build useful things, develop a portfolio of projects, get help and get recognition.

THE ASK
Create a challenge that helps people learn by doing.
Become a volunteer mentor and help new developers? Help new developers by availing yourself as a mentor.

HOW IT WORKS

We're trying to make the offering much more straight-forward. We are currently designing a set of challenges that take you through the first steps of Web Making 101. We're removing the application process, dependence on other people [what do you mean by this?], as well as the requirement to join a group. You can work on your own or with others. But don't worry, you'll still be able to get help from your peers, but in different ways than before. We're adding a mentorship feature so that participants can get one-on-one help. Once you've completed a task, you are invited to "adopt" it - which means helping those who come after you, in case they get stuck or have questions. In addition to mentorship, we're going to allow users to adopt challenges as they are completed to provide mentors that have opted-in to helping with their favorite challenges that they've completed.

We're working on a set of example challenges now to make it easier for users to contribute their own. but down the road we'll open up the ability for users to create new challenges. At this point, the best way to get i to offer mentorship. [You don't need this here if you go straight to GET INVOLVED]

--- I would probably skip the detail on challenges -- and rather let people know we'll launch the challenges for input and review soon. And go directly to the GET INVOLVED section. It's a lot of content already -- 



FIRST CHALLENGES
Webmaking 101 - Build and Launch Your First Web Portfolio

The best way to learn is by doing, and as an aspiring web developer you're going to need a portfolio. In Webmaking 101 participants are guided through a series of challenges, building important technical skills, learning the trades of being a web maker -- while leading up to the launch of their first web portfolio.

A good challenge...
1. teaches a relevant skill.
2. has a clear completion point.
3. is interesting / creative / fun to do.
4. results in some kind of output.

The output of a good challenge...
1. is different for each person who completes the challenge.
2. is worth showing to others.
3. is not embarrassing.
4. is interesting when collected with the output of others who completed the challenge.

The challenges will guide participants through creating 5 to 10 portfolio pieces and then launching a portfolio. Wherever possible, we're linking out to third party resources for documentation and theory, but tying everything together into one coherent package. The challenge based nature will lower the barrier to entry, participants can do just one challenge or all of them at their own pace.

GET INVOLVED
Mentor - Offer help to people working on Webmaking 101
Test Challenges - Complete early versions of our new challenges and give us feedback to help improve

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ABOUT SCHOOL OF WEBCRAFT
Learn web development for free, get help from your peers, and earn recognition for your skills. School of Webcraft is a partnership between P2PU and Mozilla.