Is it possible to learn to code in a day?

A lucky few of us at Imagination were recently invited to spend a day learning to code. That doesn’t sound much fun, you may think. But you’d be wrong.

For many of us our lives are spent surrounded by digital technology, and for those of us that aren’t in the digital department, we have very little knowledge about how it all works; so we jumped at the chance to find out.

We all approached the day at Decoded eager and willing to learn but a little unsure about what we had let ourselves in for and whether we would be able to keep up.

The morning kicked off nice and gently, we were introduced to our coding coaches or ‘digital Sherpas’ and told they were going to lead us to the top of the internet mountain, where we would reach digital enlightenment, leaving no one behind.

We spent the first half of the morning feeling a little too comfortable sat on the sofas as we were guided through the history of the internet, why everyone including our parents were talking about HTML5 and being introduced to the three languages of the web (HTML, CSS and JavaScript).

Having been lulled in a false sense of security, it was then time to hit the Macbook Airs, where we would put our new found knowledge into action. A couple of hrefs, heads and brackets later and much to the group’s surprise we had written our first (albeit basic) HTML website.

It was then time for the fun to start and to add a little bit of styling to our websites, quickly separating the designed focused members of the group who chose subtle greys with those, how should I say this, who have a less trained eye for colour.

Then it was back to the sofas for our final briefing of the day. We were challenged to think like coders and presented with our client brief: To design a web application that would change the content based on its location.

This bit was especially interesting because it mainly involved Google searches to track down previously-written code to borrow and merge it with our websites, a great example of how coding is open to everyone. It can be quick and simple, if you know where to look and what you are looking for.

So did we learn to code in a day?

It is safe to say we won’t be bossing the digital department around any time soon, but I think we were all surprised about how quickly we picked up the basics and how much fun it was.

I certainly can’t wait to do more!