One thing that is particularly confusing to me about platforms is how many different moving parts there are in them, especially with the everchanging use of various libraries. It seems that some instances such as React can often make things appear to be more overcomplicated than they actually are/need to be, when trying to enhance performance. Another thing that is confusing about platforms is the fact that they are constantly being updated, leaving some people confused about different terminologies and use cases. Integrating these already complex platforms, with other everchanging platforms, can cause quite a mess if not done properly.
One way that web components and VanillaJS standards could be taught in a way that is more approachable is by rather than just throwing students into a web development environment like VSCode, allow them to experiment in alternatives like CodePen as it is more friendly to syntax errors, etc. It is also very easy for them to see the changes they are making live, which can truly help understanding the languages (at least it did for me). Another way that could make it more approachable is by showing students live examples of coding, explaining why each and every step is being taken..
One thing that I found the easiest to work with on my first stab was actually implementing the CSS into the HTML. While first figuring out the HTML layout was a little confusing for me, being able to tie the CSS into specific portions of HTML and see changes happen live on CodePen just made sense to me and was a good learning experience.
One thing in tooling that was particularly confusing to me was setting up things outside of CodePen. I had never used VSCode before, so it took me sometime to finally understand the layout of it, I also did not realize that there was a built in terminal (even though it was staring me in the face) right away, so seeing this really allowed me to speed up my command line use. Another thing that confused me at first was Github, what a fork was, why we needed to do it, and how to actually get it into VSCode. I didn't really know the point of Github, but discovering it really opened my eyes into how the Web Development world functions effectively, instead of downloading ZIPS like we did in my previous courses. One thing that clicked with me immediately was how Github Desktop worked, although it is very simple, I found it very easy to navigate as well as a big time saver when it comes to transitioning Github operations into VSCode.
Although I did not use many readings, as I learn better from Visuals, one type of reading I used was ChatGPT. I used ChatGPT to get quick answers to some sort of syntaxes I did not get when looking up examples of code on other websites such as StackOverflow. Outside of this I really found YouTube Videos to be helpful, as well as some W3 workshops. I discovered that the internet often can provide solutions to many specific coding issues, although they may not be exactly identical.
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