So, yesterday, I completed the HTML and CSS sections of the pre-course material for Lambda School’s Full Stack Web Development track. At the end, there was a quiz that was broken into three parts. All of them used an online sandbox coding environment called CodePen.

CodePen is my first virtual coding environment. I like how it functions, so far. There are three resizeable sections in the top half of the screen. These sections contain HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding areas, respectively. The bottom shows the output of the three coding screens, updating in real-time.

Without going into specifics, because I don’t want to spoil the quizzes for anyone who might read this and needs to take them:

1. The first part of the quiz is called “A quiz in which you determine what the specific style rule is for the specified selector.” It gives us HTML and CSS code to review at the top, and text at the bottom. We’re asked to answer questions about CSS and how it was used to format certain elements of the web page. Some of these can get a little tricky, so make sure you understand the scope of what an element can contain and remember the order of how CSS takes effect.
2. The second part of the quiz is called “An exercise in which you give the specified HTML elements, their specified styling rules.” I found that this was a bit easier to go through than the first part of the quiz because it asks us to write our own CSS code to make certain page elements look a certain way, instead of having us inspect existing code. Both are good exercises though. This was fun because it was also actual coding, so I was finally able to put into practice some of the things I’d been reading about previously.
3. The third, and final, part of the quiz is called “An exercise in which you will build a basic web page for a business.” It asks us to write a web page from scratch using HTML and CSS. There were parameters that we had to meet, like using a certain number of specific HTML elements and CSS selectors and styling a number of HTML elements with specified CSS functions. I found this one fun, too, although I didn’t get to include the two stretch goals because one of them had no real impact on the visual aspects of the page I’d created, and the other simply didn’t seem to work when I tested it. The two stretch goals were also about CSS properties that had not been discussed in the pre-course. We were asked to research them online and use what we learn.

Its silly, but here’s a link to my submission for the third part of the quiz. Its not pretty, but neither am I. It does include all of the elements that we were asked to include, and quite a few more, but could be beautified if the requirements didn’t ask for a bunch of specific elements.

• CodePen: An exercise in which you will build a basic web page for a business.

Next, I move on to JavaScript…