July 6 - July 27, 2024

• Residential move-in date: July 6
• Move-out date: July 27

Summer 2024 applications are closed. The applications for summer 2025 will open in late fall 2024. Please sign up to receive more information.

The summer Coding Academy is a 3-week residential introduction to front-end web development. Students learn Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript (JS) and discover how to put these tools together to produce useful and attractive web pages that run on any web-enabled desktop or mobile device. Students also learn how to use GitHub to build code collaboratively. Instructor-led demos and explanations followed by hands-on in-class student exercises reinforce key concepts for long-term retention. The Coding Academy provides a strong foundation for students wishing to pursue a career in a technical field and empowers those in other fields (arts, history, literature, language, etc.) to bring new tools and thinking to their chosen discipline.

If you attend a School District of Philadelphia public or charter high school, you may be eligible to attend a Penn Summer Academy free of charge with a Penn Summer Scholarship.

Computer requirements

Students are required to bring a PC or Mac laptop computer running Windows or MacOS. Chromebooks are not capable of running the development software required for this class. Students need to have the Chrome web browser and VS Studio Code installed on their laptop before coming to class. No previous coding experience is necessary—or expected.

Features

Week 1: We initially introduce students to the mechanics of the web with a description of what happens after they enter a URL into a browser. Where does that information go? How does the browser know what to display after a user makes a request? What information is transmitted to the browser? We reveal what’s under the hood and give the students the ability to analyze the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript contained in any website.

Next, students learn how to build their own web page using HTML. They add text, links, lists, and graphic elements on a page. Then, they incorporate CSS rules to change the styling of their page elements so that users can understand and use the information on their page more easily. Students learn modern CSS display tools such as flexbox and grid to make the site usable on a wide range of screen sizes—from large-screen monitors to smartphones (responsive design).

Week 2: In the second week, we introduce JavaScript, a scripting language specifically designed for the web. Students learn variable types and the syntax of flow-control constructs such as conditional statements, program looping, and function calls. We explain how to put these code structures together to build clean, scalable code. Students learn to use JavaScript’s Document Object Model to manipulate a web page’s HTML and CSS to make dynamic, easy-to-use sites.

Week 3: In the final week of class, students flex their new coding muscles by assembling teams and creating web applications of their choosing. They learn how to use Git commands and GitHub repositories to facilitate collaborative code development under version control. They experience the give-and-take required for building an application with other programmers and how to break down and assign tasks efficiently. On the last day of class, each team presents its final working project.

Download: 2024 Syllabus (PDF)