In 2013, I was asked by an old professor of mine if I would like to be an adjunct professor for an introduction to web design course that was part of the Graphic Design curriculum at my alma mater, RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology). This was an exciting opportunity for me to get better at public speaking and to practice being a mentor for junior developers and the co-ops I worked with.
The course was essentially modeled after one of the classes I took while in the Graphic Design program. It was mostly focused on the why of web design, with a little bit of coding HTML and CSS as the main deliverable from the students. The idea was that when students spent time writing code and struggling to make CSS layouts work, they would learn how to be realistic and savvy when designing for the screen. If a student went on to enjoy coding, they could take a more advanced course where they would ultimately program their own design portfolio for use when they got out into the world.
As I organized my lesson plan for the quarter, I decided to put together a tiny HTML page that I could use to as an outline for to help me keep track of the important items to go over, and to help me manage my time during the two-hour classes.
I put together a three-column page layout with a list of each class date on the left, the outline for the selected class, and then the current time on the right (based on my computer’s current time). At the start of a class I would pull this up on my personal laptop, select the current class date, and set it next to the classroom computer.
As I presented the day’s outline I would scroll down the page and make sure to hit on each of the items on my list. I made it so every item in the outline could be clicked on and when you do that it would be highlighted, so as I glanced between my screen and the presentation monitor I would easily find where I left off.
Fin
I taught the course twice, and—fun fact—the first time I taught it was during the last year RIT would follow the quarter system. They switched over to the semester system and my second time teaching it was during that first semester.
I put this up on GitHub and kept it public in case anybody else wanted to pull it down. A few people even tried it out and contacted me about it!