This lesson is frustrating. The material makes sense, but the associated activity is complicated, and seems to be a huge jump from what the students have been doing this semester so far. I’ve looked at it in Chrome with students, and most of them felt confused and overwhelmed - as did I. I did have a look at this before class and had some reluctance to do this activity, as I don’t know what the majority of the info shown in this pane means. Plus, what we see in the Chrome developer tools Network tab doesn’t really match the examples given in the worksheets.
One more confusion about how this lesson is presented for teachers - in the Teaching Tip it says “if students haven’t previously encountered the terms “static” and “dynamic”, as used to describe web pages, those concepts should be introduced before they begin the activity.” The majority of students taking this class have not encountered those terms - so we are then guided to the wikipedia entry for Static web page to get an explanation.
The wikipedia entries for static and dynamic web pages don’t actually make a lot of sense to someone who doesn’t have a web development background - the vocabulary was overwhelming to my students (and me, for that matter). It would be much better if you could just provide a simple explanation to teachers, or guide them to a simpler definition . (this one is pretty good, https://rocketmedia.com/blog/static-vs-dynamic-websites)
Hi @mary.white,
Thank you for your feedback - you’re also not alone. I’ve heard similar sentiments from some other teachers and I agree the feel of this lesson diverges from many of the previous lessons.
For me, it helps to guide the lesson by focusing on just the high level purposes listed in the “Purpose” section. If I or my students get lost in the more detailed technical aspects or tasks of the lesson, I back off and just emphasize a couple things: We can see the actual communication between the computers is plain text (ASCII) messages, and that this is all to show that there’s protocols that get built on top of other ones, and this is one example of a higher level protocol.
Thanks for the resource about static vs dynamic websites and I’ll forward your feedback. 
Frank
I agree. Lesson needs reworking. First year teaching this course, year 24 teaching overall. We used this day to catch up on stuff.
First year code teacher. This lesson was frustrating to say the least. All the lesson have been easy to follow; this one threw me for off. Did not do the lesson as to not confuse the students.
This lesson is confusing since the browser interface changes each time I teach this lesson. I don’t emphasize the activity of observing the internet traffic but do go over the concepts of Internet layers and abstraction. I think going over the concepts is important and should not be skipped. The video does a good job of explaining these concepts.