Our Lady Star of the Sea students are challenged with Web design course

GROSSE POINTE WOODS — The fifth-graders of today are the webmasters of tomorrow. Or in some cases, the webmasters of today.

Going beyond a basic elementary school computer class, students at Our Lady Star of the Sea School in Grosse Pointe Woods have the option to take an elective that goes well beyond the basic reading, writing and arithmetic: computer coding and Web design.

Taught by Star of the Sea computer lab teacher Melissa Walter, the class teaches students the basics of Web design.

Our Lady Star of Sea started teaching coding about five years ago, when Walter’s predecessor was interested in the subject. Now the class is used so students understand basic concepts of Web design and computer programming.

“Students start learning about how to make different sizes of letters, how to open an HTML page, how to make a list, an ordered list and how to insert an image onto a webpage using coding,” Walter said. “I show them in the classroom, here is your heading, how you open an HTML page, how you save it. Then they put into their webpage the coding and get to make their own decisions on what the page will look like.”

The Web design class is an elective for fifth through eighth graders. Walter said the fifth-grade students start out by following along as Walter designs a page, and the older grades start to learn various Web design techniques until they have the skills to design their own pages and link them together.

“The final thing they produce is a list of Web design pages that links to every other Web design page,” Walter said. “It would have their name on it, saying ‘check out my website,’ with a hyperlink to the webpage on the computer.”

The Web design class has also been a learning experience for Walter, who admits she didn’t know much about HTML and CSS coding when she first started teaching the class.

“I was learning myself when we first started,” Walter said. “It was quicker for the students to pick it up, but so much harder for them to find their mistakes. It’s a frustrating class in some ways, but you have your peers looking at your website, finding the mistakes. By the end of the class, the students think, ‘I want to make a table,’ and they remember the code for that.”

Our Lady Star of the Sea principal Julie Aemisegger said the Web design class at the school is part of an initiative at Star of the Sea to introduce students to technology in the classroom as a resource for learning.

“We sat down as a faculty and staff, knowing what we know now and asking ourselves about putting students in front of computers from kindergarten to the eighth grade,” Aemisegger said.

Aemisegger points out the Web design class isn’t the only place at Our Lady Star of the Sea where students can show off their computer prowess. The program for the school open house is designed by students, and even third-graders are now doing spreadsheets.

“I think our parents expect this kind of curriculum from us,” Aemisegger said. “Our parents expect we look at any class and ask, ‘What is the most you can put before any student?’ I think students pick up so much of it on their own.”

In addition to showing the students’ capabilities, Aemisegger said the Web design class shows teachers’ ability to adapt to the growing and changing needs in education.

“There are changes constantly in education, and I think our staff knows curriculum and education is changing, and they know they have to stay on top of all those changes,” Aemisegger said. “They are true educators who not only want to learn themselves, but impart that thirst for learning onto their students.”

With the world growing ever more reliant on computers and programming, Web design and coding are becoming important skills in the world.

But Walter said there is another advantage to teaching Web design that goes beyond the world of code.

“Web design reminds me of math, not that you’re counting, but it has to be logically centered,” Walter said. “Web design makes the students more logical; the computer will only do what you tell it to do. It’s learning that idea of logic, that one thing has to build upon itself to make the whole.”