Date added: Monday, July 20 2009, 09:11AM
Tutoring my peers
One of the assignments of a class I had in school last semester was spend 28 hours on trivial tasks such as helping out at open houses, being a peer coach (that is: helping first year students out with classes they need some assistance in), etc.
I decided to take a slightly different twist in spending those 28 hours on account of two classmates of mine asking me for help with PHP and HTML.
I asked the teacher in question if it was alright for me to spend my 28 hours in this fashion and sure enough, I was answered with that it was more than alright.
I decided to focus my lessons on a couple of different web related topics, namely (in order):
- basic tagsoup HTML
- CSS
- XHTML
- Accessibility standards
- Javascript: basics
- Javascript: DOM-manipulation
- PHP: basics (variables, basic i/o, forms)
- PHP: filesystem i/o, making a guestbook using a flatfile database
- PHP: using SQL
- Security: SQL injections, HTML injections/cookie theft, miscellaneous other tidbits (how to circumvent HTML restrictions in websites that filter HTML, injecting HTML/javascript by exploiting UBB code parsers, etc.)
Giving these lessons was really a lot of fun, so I found out.
I was also given a lot of positive feedback and some constructive criticism regarding the pace of the lessons (some felt it went a bit too fast).