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In this dissertation, I argue that society increasingly recognizes the value of widespread computational literacy and that one of the most common ways that people are exposed to creative computing today is through web development. Prior research has investigated how beginners learn a wide range of programming languages in a variety of domains, from computer science majors taking introductory programming courses to end-user developers maintaining spreadsheets. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the experiences people have learning web development. What barriers do beginners face when authoring their first web pages? What mistakes do they commonly make when writing HTML and CSS? What are the computational skills and concepts with which they engage? How can tools and practices be designed to support these activities?
Through a series of studies, interleaved with the iterative design of an experimental web editor for novices called openHTML, this dissertation aims to fill this gap in the literature and address these questions. In drawing connections between my findings and the existing computing education literature, my goal is to attain a deeper understanding of the skills and concepts at play when beginners learn web development, and to broaden notions about how people can develop computational literacy.
This dissertation makes the following contributions: • An account of the barriers students face in an introductory web development course, contextualizing difficulties with learning to read and write code within the broad activity of web development. • The implementation of a web editor called openHTML, which has been designed to support learners by mitigating non-coding aspects of web development so that they can attend to learning HTML and CSS. • A detailed taxonomy of errors people make when writing HTML and CSS to construct simple web pages, derived from an intention-based analysis. • A fine-grained analysis of HTML and CSS syntax errors students make in the initial weeks of a web development course, how they resolve them, and the role validation plays in these outcomes. • Evidence for basic web development as a rich activity involving numerous skills and concepts that can support foundational computational literacy.