The Benefits of HTML Slides for Programming Lectures
Pamela Fox · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 · 2022
Many instructors use slide formats like Keynote, Powerpoint, Google Docs, or PDF for their lectures. When the topic is programming, those slides formats are highly problematic: it is hard for the presenter to format code snippets with helpful syntax highlighting and hard for students to copy/paste code snippets and preserve indentation. The result is hard-to-read code and students that are less likely to try code for themselves. A better format is HTML slides. The slides are written with simple HTML tags, and a JavaScript library renders them as interactive slides. As a result, all of the code snippets have automatic syntax highlighting plus a one-click copy-to-clipboard button. For some programming languages, the code can even be executed on the slide itself. The slides still have the features of traditional formats: they can be converted to PDF for easy printing and note-taking, slide fragments can be animated in sequence (just by adding a single class name to a tag). But they have even more benefits, thanks to being web pages. HTML slides can be fully accessible for students with disabilities by following WCAG guidelines when writing the HTML, and they can be easily indexed by web search engines, making it easier for students across the world to learn from them. This lightning talk will take you on a tour of HTML slides and share a webpage with additional tips for how to get started with HTML slides in your own programming classes.