I am always on the look-out for ways to teach my students some basic html coding, as a way to show them the “underneath” of the Internet. I’ll sometimes pull up a source code of a website we are using, and talk a bit about the coding that goes on to create the tools that they are using. A friend sent me a link to Mozilla Thimble, which is a fairly recent online tool that teaches a bit about coding, in an interesting way. Everything is online — from the coding itself to the publishing.

One of the links from Mozilla is a “create an animal” page, and so I went there this morning, and spent a bit of time. What I love is that the interface shows both the html coding on the left, and the results on the right. The instructions are simple (for the most part) and within minutes, I had created an imaginary beast and published it online (hosted by Mozilla).

This kind of site might be a perfect introduction to coding, and creating,and you could easily tie it into a unit around animal habitats, too.

Peace (in the code),
Kevin