Structure

Courses, units, and modules

Making with Code (MWC) is organized into courses, units, and modules. A course contains the curricular content a teacher and students would use for one or two semesters. Courses contain one or more units; each unit is a cluster of content organized around essential questions, providing materials to guide student learning for 1-2 months. Units start with a sequence of labs which introduce students to new ideas and skills, leading to an open-ended project in which students use those ideas to build personally-meaningful projects. Sometimes units also contain problem sets, which are designed for students to complete independently. We refer to labs, problem sets, and projects as modules.

The structure of the MWC website mirrors this pedagogical structure: courses are sections under site/content/courses, units are sections with a course, and modules are sections within a unit. Each section may also contain additional pages and assets such as images. The site's file tree looks like this:

site/content/courses
├── _index.md
├── mwc1
│   ├── _index.md
│   ├── unit1
│   │   ├── _index.md
│   │   ├── lab_turtle
│   │   │   ├── _index.md
│   │   │   └── compare_terminal_finder.png
│   │   ├── project_drawing
│   │   │   └── _index.md
│   ├── unit2
│   │   ├── _index.md
│   │   ├── lab_pipes
│   │   │   └── _index.md
│   │   ├── lab_weather
│   │   │   ├── _index.md
│   │   │   └── weather_functions.png

Metadata

In Zola, each section or page has front matter specifying metadata. In the MWC site, each course, unit, and module has some required metadata.

Course

+++
title = "Making With Code I"
[extra]
slug = "mwc1"
git_backend = "mwc"
+++

• extra.slug: A short string consisting of lower-case letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores. Slugs are used to create URL paths (for example, https://makingwithcode.org/courses/mwc1/unit1/lab_turtle and to create course/unit/module directories on students' computers.
• extra.git_backend: Specifies which git-hosting service the course will use. The MWC accounts server automatically administers the git backend, creating a repository for each user for each module, and granting teachers permissions to access students' repositories. Currently, the only supported git backend is "mwc", which is hosted at https://git.makingwithcode.org.

Unit

+++
title = "Unit 1: Drawing"
[extra]
slug = "unit1"
+++

• extra.slug: Works the same way as a course slug.

Module

+++
title = "Turtle"
template = "module.html"
[extra]
slug = "lab_turtle"
repo_url = "https://git.makingwithcode.org/mwc/lab_turtle.git"
+++

• template: Should be "module.html". The MWC theme adds some styling to modules.
• extra.slug: Same as above.
• extra.repo_url: The URL for the module's template repository, from which students' repositories will be forked.