Review ~ Motherboard Books Let's Make A Web Page
Help kids learn how to use HTML coding to make their own websites. This coding course for kids is so easy to use.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.
I believe in today’s day and age computer skills are very important. Our family was very excited to have the opportunity to review Let’s Make a Web Page by Motherboard Books. Since my oldest daughter has started a private blog, these editing skills will be put to good use!
Motherboard Books was created by Phyllis Wheeler an experienced homeschooling mother who created a great line of computer skill curriculum for her own children. Thankfully she has also published these to help other families.
Let’s Make a Web Page is a 60-page PDF ebook, that retails for $19.95. This program is designed for children aged 8 to 12 years old.
Table of Contents:
Introduction for Parents
Lesson 1: An Interview
Lesson 2: Download and Set Up the Program
Lesson 3: Add Text
Lesson 4: Make a Table
Lesson 5: Add Photo
Lesson 6: From the Internet, Add Animations
Lesson 7: Browser Check, Backgrounds, Photos
Lesson 8: Sound
Lesson 9: Links
Lesson 10: Post Your Work
Appendix: How to Upload to the Internet
This program is written in a conversational style and walks the children through designing a web page using the Coffee Cup Visual Site Designer and NotePad. Coffee Cup is a paid program but they give you a 30-day trial when you download it.
This is long enough to work through the program, but if you wanted to continue after this you would need to buy Coffee Cup or switch to a free HTML editor. Coffee Cup runs only on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8.
Since this course is in PDF form I decided instead of printing it off, that I would copy it to our Android tablet. This worked out really well! We were able to zoom in on the screenshots when needed easily. It also saved some ink and paper!
I much prefer to load ebooks onto a tablet then print them when possible. Using the tablet also saved us from flicking back and forth between windows on the computer.
The suggested project for this course is for the student to choose a person to interview. Then build their web page around the interview. Our children decided to pick their own topics and started to build their first page about our new puppy.
Our family has enjoyed using this program, I think it is a great introduction to HTML for children. I picked up a few tips myself! While we started out using Coffee Cup we switched to a different WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor.
Coffee Cup is a great web editor but it doesn’t run on Linux our main operating system. This way our children could work on their websites on any of our computers.
The concepts taught in Let’s Make a Web Page transferred easily to our other program. Even though the menu options were in different places and the screens looked a little different it was still very easy to figure out.
One advantage of starting out with the Coffee Cup editor is that the step-by-step photos will match exactly what your child is seeing on the screen. Coffee Cup is a very easy editor to use for a beginner website designer. If there was a version for Linux I would consider buying it for the kids to use.
We found this was a wonderful program and I would recommend it to any family who would like an introduction to web page design for their children.
