3greeneggs

How can any teacher resist the lure of Talk Like a Pirate Day? And the even greater challenge of integrating it into a course in a meaningful way?

I find that beginning web design students have trouble with the concept of a namespace, and for good reason. Imagine that you have just learned the concept of markup, and committed yourself to understanding a finite set of XHTML tags. Then you read a chapter that indicates that that finite set is just the beginning — that there are, in fact, a multitude of markup universes that you might move into, with near-infinite possibilities. Just when you were getting comfortable with one thing, it becomes something else.

A namespace, or the scope in which you determine meaning of a particular name or set of names, is not directly relevant to client-side web designers. It’s important, though, because it provides context for why certain things are the way they are, and is good background for when students move on to XML.

Our pirate vocabulary, in the scope of Talk Like a Pirate day, is a great example of a namespace! It’s a whole set of names (words) that have a special meaning … and can be combined with a more typical vocabulary.

Why are pirates awesome? Because they arrrrrrrrr!