What is your makerspace like today?

My makerspace has become an actual course in the middle school that I work in. I teach a computer programming elective this year, which I did not teach last year. Last year I held the makerspace activities after school once a week, and taught a bit of HTML5 programming in my middle school library classes and in my college research skills class, but this year I have my own class dedicated to HTML programming! It is an elective class which meets twice per week. There are 18 8th grade students in the class and I am teaching them, at this point, very basic HTML5 commands. We are up to learning how to link documents to each other and to link to outside URLs and will very soon start to learn how to add images to our web pages. The students use two programs this year that they did not use last year. One is the Editra text editor. This is a free program available for download that allows students to type in their code and save it to their flash drives. Next, students check their files at http://validator.w3.org. This is a site that allows you to upload your HTML files and it will tell you line by line where your errors are. It is very important to be able to check your code line by line because one small error can mean the difference between the page showing up properly in a browser and not showing up at all. If students have made mistakes, they will have to go back to that line and correct their code before saving and uploading again. Students then log in to their Neocities accounts where they upload their files to their website hosted by this free HTML hosting site. In preparation for each class, I create a sheet of code like the one below and I print out 18 copies with the printer that was purchased with the grant. Students are to copy the code exactly as they see it on the sheet. I thought of making a wiki and copying the code to the wiki, but then I ran the risk of students cheating and copying and pasting the code directly into their files. And they wouldn’t learn the code if they did that. It would certainly save on paper and ink, but the students wouldn’t learn anything. Once students have uploaded their HTML files that they create in class to their Neocities accounts, they are “live” on the Web. You can see one student’s site here: http://ahhcp.neocities.org/relativeURLs.html. Not everybody has gotten as far as this student has (most have), but you can go to the site, hit ctrl-u and take a look at the code underneath. All of the code was done by hand.