A website can offer a new approach to solving problems. That’s what the elementary team at the Frisco Athletic Center is learning this semester in ideaSpark. The team, comprised of Ella, Isaac, Muhammad and Adrian, have tackled school bullying and encouraged reading in their team website projects. The students as a team have learned to discuss problems they face, ask questions on what they don’t know, wireframe their webpages using pencil and paper, and build webpages using their new HTML and CSS skills.

Book recommendations

Like many kids their age, this team gets excited about all things Star Wars, Minecraft and Pokemon Go. That sparked an idea to create a website that recommends books to kids based on their interests. Ella is in charge of the homepage, and she’s using her design and CSS skills to make an engaging landing page. Users start by selecting their interest, which will direct them to a student page with books on that topic — Minecraft (Adrian), Star Wars (Isaac) and Pokemon Go! (Muhammad). 

Here is a video of Issac describing the team's website project:

All four students on the team are most excited about the design part, which uses CSS or cascading style sheets.

“I like to style the websites. So after we make them, we get to design them. I use CSS and we type in the code for it and play around with it,” Ella said.

“I’ve enjoyed that I could make other things, like color the words or put things in the middle. I can make the background a color, make things move when I hover over them or bring people to other pages when you click on them,” added Adrian.

In their first project together, the team tackled school bullying with each student taking a different topic like verbal abuse or cyber bullying.