Newbie - where to start with my idea?

V

VladTepes

New Member
I am basically a newbie at website design. I am a high school math (geometry) teacher and want to create a website where my students can do practice problems (homework & classwork). I am developing a bank of several hundred practice problems, grouped by skills needed and chapter (from our book).

Each student's practice set will be geared toward that individual student's needs (working towards mastery of skills, review of already-mastered skills, and practice on the current lesson topic). I will need to do the programming that will determine each student's practice set based on his/her past work (database of past work).

The student's will also be able to view their progress - probably on a pie chart.

Obviously, the student's will need to login to their individual accounts. And I will need to be able to login to a completely different interface to the site so that I can monitor student progress, view test scores (and data to inform my instructional focus), manage student accounts, set parameters for practice sets, etc).

Given that I am on a very limited budget (no cost is great!), I have several questions about what software and web server to use:

1) What software should I use to create the web pages?
2) What programming language should I use for programming?
3) What database should I use?
4) Where should I host the site?

I am probably not asking the right questions, but I must start somewhere...

Thanks for any help
 
R

redig

New Member
How soon did you want this implemented?

If you want this soon, then the posters above me are correct. Somebody who already knows the programming behind it would be necessary to get this done fast.

If, however, this is a long-term goal you'd like to create, I'd say you can do it over time.

For the second option, I would recommend a comprehensive project action plan where you break it down into self-contained mini goals. "I want a student to be able to log in" would be its own project. Use that goal to learn enough about a language (I like PHP for a couple reasons, the best of which is that it's free) to complete it. I'm fully self taught, so I'm confident that even if you're not a well rounded programmer, you can teach yourself enough to accomplish specific goals.

But in this case, you're looking at a year probably for even basic functionality that meets the minimum of your needs.

Either way, I'd recommend writing up a detailed list of features of what you'd like. You'll either want this in hiring a programmer or for your own development if you do it yourself.


PHP & MySQL are a good combination for backend logic and database.

HTML & CSS are necessary for making your page look like anything beyond white background with black text.

JavaScript/JQuery is highly valuable in making a dynamic front end (expand/collapse functionality, hiding/revealing text, etc).
 
G

Glenn

Member
I am also a math teacher that has taken up web design. I have built a similar site to the one you are describing here. If I knew it was ok to post it, I would or maybe you can send me a pm and I will give you the link.
 
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