WEB 'n' STUDY
START
ver 0.6 alpha
Web 'n' Study presents you START - a learning support tool. It's meant to help students understand basics of programming and front-end web development. The system can be used for self-education or as a tool in schools and courses. Web application Flowcharts is used for creating visual algorithmic representations, and for learning programming basics. Web Front on the other hand, serves as the tool for experimenting with front-end web development, by creating HTML, CSS and JavaScript code.
To support all that, we have developed this WAE (Web Application Environment) where web applications can be used in a familiar manner. The look&feel of the WAE is flexible and can be tweaked as desired. Also, the current state of whole system can be locally saved and loaded at a later time.
The Flowcharts is the main component of the START. It's meant for complete beginners in computer programming and it helps them to learn how to think like a programmer. The idea is not to concentrate on the syntax of some programming language, but to think only about problem solution. Students "program" by drawing a flowchart, using just a few different nodes.
That's how we can develop algorithms that include most common sequential structures, selections and iterations. We can create two-way and multiple selections, as well as repeating sequences (counter-based and condition-based).
We can work with numeric, logic and string data types. One-dimensional and multi-dimensional arrays are supported too. Our program can be organized into subroutines so we can solve even problems that require recursion.
The best thing is that we don't have to create just some boring number-crunching programs or some that just manipulate array data. We can also make some fun stuff using some built-in graphic functions, so we can also learn basics of computer graphics and animation.
The programming skills we get this way, can be applied in almost any programming language.
Application Web Front is intended for quick and easy experimenting with front-end web development. It's main advantage is that everything is done within the web browser, without the need of installing any additional software on the computer. Also, the CSS Panel component of the application has integrated list of CSS attributes, arranged by category, which is quite helpful for beginners.
The purpose of this web application is an easy presentation of examples and solutions for different exercises in web design and front-end development. Thanks to that, students can tweak the code and see what happens right away.