Moving Forward

I hope everyone is having a great holiday. Things have been going at a steady pace here. Slow and steady that is 🙂.

As I am sure you have noticed, the website has changed quite a bit over the holidays. It has gone from a heavy 3d based site to a more traditional looking website. I do plan on integrating some 3d elements back in, but right now I am still working on the functionality of the site.

This time around I am using Astro for the front end. I know, I have used so many different frameworks over the last decade, but that is a big part of what I really enjoy about the developmental cycle. Learning new things. Right now the stack that I am playing around with includes Astro, Svelte, Tailwind, GSAP, and Babylon. I am still playing around with different database options, but for my needs, almost all of them are the same.

I am planning to have the first course done around the end of January to the middle of February. This will be the python portion of my Introduction to Computer Science class that I teach. I am sure it will take a few versions to get it the way I want it as I am not much of a writer, but I am hoping I can improve on that with this new website.

The next few courses that I have planned are Blender, Babylon.js, and AP Computer Science A (Java). Blender will more than likely be the next one, but at this moment I do not have the order set, just a list. If I can get those four courses complete and in a shape that I am satisfied with, I will start looking at more. The classes that I teach at school will take priority, but remember, I like to learn new things. So anything is really possible.

Each course that requires it, will have a link on the course page that will link to a GitHub repository with all of the code for that course broken up into modules.

The long term goal is to have a testing system in place that will test your knowledge on topics covered in the course. A score can be given, and if the user has a profile (not required), they can earn a badge on the website for completion levels of each course. The complete gamification of the content has not really been looked at as I am still so early in the creating stage.

Well that is it for this 500-ish word update. As I said in the beginning, have a safe and enjoyable holiday season.