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Jonas teaches the course “Development 4” in the International Digital Experience Design direction, where students learn to set up their own backend, including an API to connect their front-end application.
The programming language used is PHP, the language used in all our Sevendays projects. We use PHP in the form of a framework called Laravel.
A PHP framework is a collection of building blocks for developing web applications. It gives developers a structured environment in which they can write, test, debug, manage and maintain web applications.
The aim of the course “Development 4” is to learn PHP in 8 weeks. Then Jonas came up with the thought "Why learn everything in PHP if you can also use a framework?"
This was positively received, so the 8 weeks of PHP were divided into 4 weeks to learn the basics of PHP and then another 4 weeks to apply this in Laravel.
A very ambitious plan, but one in which students are introduced to the way of working and tools that are also used in a professional environment.
These were challenging weeks where teaching methods were constantly evaluated and adjusted.
During the first Laravel lesson it quickly became clear how useful a framework is. Everything that previously took a lot of time in pure PHP suddenly became a lot easier. Nice to see that the students immediately saw the usefulness of this.
They were also introduced to tools that we use at Sevendays and learned how to set up an API. To top it all off, they were taught how to successfully deploy a Laravel project on a hosting environment.
