WIP: Beginner web app architecture

[jaredatron]

@tannerwelsh can you give me your initial thoughts on where I'm headed with this incomplete goal

[tannerwelsh]

Nice start @deadlyicon. Here are my thoughts:

• The progression seems well-paced. Enough to allow a beginner to be challenged, but not too difficult.
• Start with the outcome. I'm not sure what is going to be produced here, so it's difficult to contextualize my learning. What is the end result meant to be? Why go through these stages?
• If you have different specs for each stage, why not just have each stage produce its own mini-app? In other words, have learners build 7 different apps (in subfolders, probably) that build off of each other.
• Requiring a review after each stage seems like a recipe for bottlenecking. I'm wary of bringing in time- and resource-dependent game mechanics into the goal itself. Better (IMHO) to define one metric for completeness instead of a bunch of mini-completenesses that must be completed in order and are blocking.
• It's very tutorial-y (which has its pros and cons). While adding structure is useful for beginners, it is best used when it helps explain why to do something rather than just what to do. The start of a stage should tell me first why this stage is needed, and how it acts as a bridge between its neighbors. The learning objectives you list are useful for this, but you could be more explicit about the why. For example, "In stage one, we are going to create the most basic kind of website: all of the content will be stored in static (not changing) files and sent directly to the browser by the server".
• Another thing that could help the stages tie together is to pick an actual product (a blog, maybe) that you are building towards. It helps to have some semi-real product with semi-real constraints so that the stages aren't so arbitrary. Stage 1 is MVP, 2 is improvement, 3 adds features, etc.