Every time you check your email, watch a video, or order food, you're using an application someone else built. In this semilab, we'll learn to build our own.
We'll start from scratch: how does a webpage actually work? What happens between the moment you click a button and the moment something appears on screen? We'll break a web application into its two big pieces — the presentation layer (what the user sees) and the logic layer (what happens behind the scenes) — and learn the tools that let you build both.
Along the way, we'll:
- Write HTML and CSS to structure and style a page from the ground up.
- Add interactivity with JavaScript: responding to clicks, updating content, and making things feel alive.
- Connect to real APIs to pull in outside data — weather, images, whatever fits your project — so your app can talk to the wider internet.
By the end, you'll have a working web application you built yourself and a clear picture of how the apps you use every day are put together. More importantly, you'll have the skills to keep building on your own. Have an idea for a tool, a game, or something nobody's thought of yet? You'll know how to make it real.
Prerequisites: We'll be using JavaScript throughout. No prior experience with it is needed, but comfort with basic programming in any language (variables, conditionals, loops) is helpful.