mhiskall282/novice-dev-with-ai

This repository is a structured 4-day classroom for learning basic web development from scratch, designed for complete beginners. Each day is a 2-hour live session conducted over Zoom. The curriculum covers setting up a development environment on day one, then progresses through HTML basics, CSS styling, and finally CSS Flexbox and responsive design, ending with each student building a personal web page. What makes this repository different from a standard tutorial is the integration of AI tools directly into the learning workflow. The project uses Claude and GitHub Copilot as teaching aids, but the AI is configured to explain and guide rather than just write code for the student. A hidden folder called .claude contains the AI's instruction files, including specialized tutors for HTML and CSS, code review standards, and 125 knowledge topics the AI can draw from when answering questions. Students are told not to edit this folder. Students follow an 8-step workflow at the start of every session: pull the instructor's latest changes, switch to their personal branch, open their project folder, start a live server that refreshes the browser automatically as they type, then read the lesson notes before writing any code. Before asking the AI for help, students fill in a prompt template with their current module, goal, existing code, and specific question. The template approach is intentional: the repository treats asking an AI to write code for you as the wrong move, and asking it to explain why your code is not working as the right one. The full curriculum has 8 modules that go beyond the 4 live days. After the core sessions, students work through CSS Grid, responsive design, accessibility, and basic JavaScript. All student work goes into individual subfolders and is submitted via pull requests, giving everyone practice with a real developer workflow from day one. The repository is structured as both a student resource and an instructor playbook. A teaching guide gives the instructor a minute-by-minute script for each Zoom session. The code standards files define what the AI uses when reviewing student HTML and CSS.