Grow with Google Challenge – Week 2 – CSS

Week 2 – CSS

In the first week of the challenge, I learned about how to use HTML to create the structure of a Web Page. If you missed that post you can find it here. The second week of taking the “Grow with Google Challenge” on Udacity was all about Cascading Style Sheets.

The CSS portion of the challenge included a CSS lesson unit, a problem set, and a final project.

In the CSS units of this course, we learned about using CSS in the <style> tag in the HTML file and also by using an external CSS file and linking to it. We learned what selectors and attributes are. A great addition to this course is that we learned how to use the browser’s developer tools to test out changes on our web pages.

It was a great introduction to CSS and I appreciated the fact that Udacity quickly moves the students from using CSS in the HTML file and rather using an externally linked file. I have seen too many introductory Web Development courses that continue to use an inline style or CSS in the <style> tag. Using an external file is the better option and is best practice.

Coding Faster

But before we got to the final CSS project, we had a short intermission to learn about “how to code faster”. This section taught us how to use keyboard shortcuts to make typing in or editing code faster. There were practice exercises and Udacity had us do a with or without comparison to see the difference between using the shortcuts and without. Great little inclusion in the course.

Final Project

The final project for this unit was to create an “Animal Trading Card”. This activity was a fun challenge and you were encouraged to use your imagination when creating the card. If you go into the Slack channel for this project you will see hundreds of variations using different animals, colors, fonts, and background images. It is easy to see that the students all enjoyed creating and sharing their cards. See my final project here.

CSS Resources:
Mozilla Developer Network
CSS Almanac

Next week I will be tackling the Javascript portion of the course. This is a very large section and should bring a lot of new challenges. Looking forward to jumping into the next unit.

Learn about the Udacity Grow with Google Challenge
See what I do in Week 3 of the Udacity Grow with Google Challenge
See what I did in Week 1 of the Udacity Grow with Google Challenge