Why I teach HTML marquee...

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School has concluded for the summer and I am very pleased with how much progress the kids made but I am always looking for ways to improve by reviewing my course content (middle school coding) in preparation for the next year.

The first thing students learn (after learning how to use code editors) are the basic tags; h1-h6, hr, b, u, i, etc.
But I also show the marquee tag, which I know is obsolete and could stop working anytime.

However, kids love it and do funny and goofy things with it. When it’s time to learn about attributes nothing works better than using the marquee tag and the corresponding attributes to solidify their understanding of using them. Down the road src, href, id, and class are easier for them to digest.

And this student…well, I think it’s cute.
http://muskiecoding.com/purple7/silash/random-marquee.html

OK, should I still stop with the marquee? Or continue with it until it’s gone?

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You should keep showing it! Like you mention, kids enjoy learning from it. At this stage, having fun is an equally important part of teaching programming. Correctness is the other part, but they will have a lifetime of snarky colleagues who can help with that haha :yum:

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http://muskiecoding.com/purple7/silash/random-marquee.html link no longer works.

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Archive.org didn’t have anything either: Wayback Machine :frowning:

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So sorry! I moved things around to make room for new group of students. Here is the new one.
http://muskiecoding.com/2018cms/purple7/silash/random-marquee.html

I have 240 middle school kids this semester, which is about 30 more than usual! And we are finishing up with CSS animation and getting started with JS.

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That is really great to hear!!! :grinning: