A Top-Down Approach to Teaching Web Development in the Cloud

The importance of web development education is increasingly gaining attention. However, the teaching of web development has a relatively undeveloped pedagogy. In this paper we propose a top-down approach to teaching app development. The proposed approach comprises three phases: preparation phase, web technology tutorial phase, and capstone project phase. The preparation phase requires instructor to select a sample web application, to extract the technological components of this application, and to select core technical topics for the tutorials. The tutorial phase consists of a series of lectures and hands-on tasks that help students learn web technologies used for implementing the sample application, with a focus on how disparate technologies were integrated and related to each other. The capstone project phase requires instructor to group students into teams to implement their own web applications. We present our web development course to exemplify the implementation of the proposed approach, which provides rich implications to both practitioners and researchers of web development education. We also discuss the strengths and limitations of the proposed approach within the landscape of previous studies and learning theories.