At The Undead Institute we believe “getting braaains should be fun.” We’re trying to take stodgy and boring technical topics and inject them with life… errr… unlife(?)… very flustered You know what we mean.
Why Zombies? Not just a gimmick. We use apocalyptic analogies to make the concepts clearer and silly jokes to make learning fun. Plus research suggests laughing while learning helps you retain the information. For more info check out this Fast Company Article and this one from Edutopia.
This is kinda weird. Is John legit? John’s been working as a web developer for 15+ years and has been teaching web development at the college level for 7+ years. Also check out John’s professional publications and conference talks.
Post-apocalyptic HTML Shooting Gallery – students practice matching HTML opening and closing tags before the zombies fire back. Progresses from simple matching through self-closing tags through nesting.
Apocalyptic Descent – helps students get a handle on descendant selectors by following ZomBomBot deep into zombie-infested caverns and calling down missiles from Human command.
Select-a-Zombie – teaches CSS selectors i.e. how CSS properties are applied to HTML elements. Progresses through tags, classes, ids, descendant selectors, various pseudo-classes, selector combinators and attribute selectors.
Zombie Specificity Wars – card game that helps students learn the rules of specificity which governs what happens when two CSS selectors conflict.
2 Minutes to Save the World – an email newsletter that’s Zombie smashing web development articles, tips and silliness in 2 minutes or less.
Interviews with working web developers, designers and other web people
This curriculum is aimed at 8th and 9th graders, but the Chief Zombie Smacker, himself, John Rhea, has used it to great effect with his Community College students (he just goes faster).
