Astro Code School: What I Learned Teaching at UNC

This spring semester, I had the honor of teaching JOMC-583 "Multimedia Programming and Production" for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The course requires university permission and two prior multimedia programming courses that focus on frontend web development. It was a wonderful opportunity to partner with the university, especially with a department that has shown leadership in recent years with adopting innovative programs and coursework for students interested in the data-driven area of journalism.

The subject matter of the course centered around backend web development with Python and Django and also included other technologies such as git, SQL, and the Unix command line. As a rough outline, the lecture topics were:

1. Unix command line

2. Git and Github

3. Python

4. Introductory Django

5. Django views and templates

6. Django models and data modeling

7. Frontend development inside a Django project

8. Miscellaneous topics

9. Group project time

The course materials were based on Steven King's curriculum for the course from the year prior and is available at https://github.com/calebsmith/j583

At a high-level, the first half of the course was a mixture of lecture and individual assignments while the second half of the course was spent on two projects. The first development project was completed individually and was small in scale. The second and final project was more ambitious and required collaboration using Github. This served as a nice progression from focusing on concrete skills in isolation to applying those skills and developing further experientially.

One of the group projects was deployed successfully to Heroku and is visible here: http://rackfind.herokuapp.com/

While I think the course was a major learning experience for the students, it certainly was for me as well. It was particularly interesting to see the subject areas that students picked up easily or struggled with and how this often differed with my expectations. In particular, some areas that students picked up quickly were:

1. The essential Unix command line tools such as: pwd, ls, cd, and so on

2. Python basics

3. Python packaging and setup, especially pip and virtualenv

4. Using Git as a sole contributor

5. Creating a data model

The students were much quicker to learn these concepts than I anticipated. For instance, we spent two lecture periods focusing on developing skills for the command line, but the first class was enough for most tasks. In the future, I would likely plan on needing only one lecture for that topic.

Some topics that required more reinforcement than anticipated were:

1. Why writing a custom backend is desirable as opposed to a static HTML site

2. The semantics of Django URL routing.

3. How to glue JavaScript code into Django templates

I think the fundamental reason that students struggled with this more than anticipated relates to their arrival to the domain of backend programming from a background of frontend web development.

This was a great experience for me and it was rewarding to see my students succeed in programming with Python and Django. I'm very much looking forward to more opportunities to teach web development in the future.