font color = crap

I’m teaching a web design class to 11 kids (ages 10-13) in our homeschool co-op. Yesterday they learned about the “font” tag and worked with different sizes, typefaces, and colors. Once they mastered the basics, they started asking questions.

“What happens if you add the color codes together?” One boy experimented, adding {font color=”#FFFFFF+FF0000+660099+FFFFCC”} to his HTML document. Inexplicably, the color came out yellow. Interesting.

“Is there a “light” tag?” Not that I’m aware of. “But check it out…” And he showed me how using the “light” tag as an opposite to the “strong” tag produced a thinner, lighter font. Huh.

I’m sure there are logical explanations for these results. I don’t know everything about web design. I explained to them that a lot of the things they were trying out might work on their own computer, but are not valid HTML tags and would likely show up differently on different browsers and operating systems. It led to a discussion (that I hadn’t planned until a later point in the class) about how designers are often frustrated by the different standards used by different browsers (curse you IE!).

At the end of class, one boy quietly showed me the background color of his web page. It was a brownish-yellowish-greenish color that looked like baby poop. He told me he put {body bgcolor=”crap”} in his code. We laughed hysterically.

That kind of “crap” would get you detention (at a minimum) in any school. But I was thrilled. The kids were using their brains, taking the next step, testing the limits and making a connection. These are the times when I am overjoyed to be homeschooling and interacting with such an amazing bunch of kids.

Tagged as: Homeschooling, learning