An interactive and open source platform to acquire web design skills individually and collaboratively

I loved the entire collection of Mozilla tools starting with teach.mozilla.org because it doesn't only focus on coding, which is text based javascript, but focuses on learning how the web works and being cognizant of important things like copyright. I love that it is self-guided and is about creating something that can be recreated. Again, for beginners, I do recommend tackling several projects before jumping in blindly but I do recommend eventually jumping in as Thimble has proved that doing so is the most effective way to learn.

I think either having them work in small groups first or on remixes individually is the best way to start. After students have some experience they can work on new projects from scratch on their own. I like that students can easily share their work when done.

Thimble is part of a larger suite of three programs from Mozilla called Webmaker. It is undoubtedly the most powerful (at least, in terms of making a webpage) but the ease of use is really pretty minimal: features include a left and right window in which to code in raw HTML and immediately preview the results but without any "drag and drop" suggestions it's hard to know what HTML to use. Thimble does nicely color codes different tags and comments but it's a pretty long learning curve to produce the fancy CSS style webpages youth are used to... I would be surprised if any students under 13 or 14 really engaged with the tool and, while it has potential to really educate, I think many kids will be underwhelmed by it. Users with a lot of patience will really excel from Thimble's immediate feedback on weather HTML code is correct (as they will see it either work or not work on the right side of the screen) but pop-up suggestions about wrong code are a little cryptic. For my own learning, I found the Thimble in combination with Code Academy was a better way to learn simple HTML code, but I found that this knowledge was still a pretty far way from CSS. I've learned as well from changing values in remixed code and seeing where, in the code, those directions originate (in order and format) but, all in all, Thimble seems like a work in progress. Having worked a little with the Chicago Hive (a program of Mozilla, the folks behind Thimble), I know that they are looking at improving the tool.