Introducing Our New Website!

We are pleased to announce CLIPCO's new website!  Over the summer, we had a team of CLIP alumni designing and developing our new site!  The CLIPCOders team, led by college freshman Jasper Edbrooke, include Evan Cleve, and Alex Minooka, all students who graduated from CLIP in 2014.

Visit the site often for updates, announcements and special features, such as spotlights on students, teachers and parents.  The new design is mobile-friendly, and will have all your news and updates for CLIP!

We interviewed Jasper to find out more about the strategy and design behind the new website:

Who are you?
I am Jasper Edbrooke, and I am currently a freshman at De Anza College. I graduated CLIP with the CLIP class of 2014.

How did you and your team get together?
I got the team together by asking some other CLIP alumni from my year that I knew had experience or were interested in web development/computers. The original crew included about 7 people, but by the end a majority of the work ended up falling on only three of us. There was Evan, a senior at Homestead High School, Alex, a senior at Lynbrook High School, and myself, I'm enrolled in Middle College at De Anza. We are all graduates of the 2014 CLIP class. For getting the work done, at each meeting we would come up with a list of tasks that needed to be completed, then each of us would select a task and work on it, then check it off on the list when we finished and pick a new task, and then continuing this cycle until all the tasks were done.

How did you determine the design of the new site?

The design originally started from a template we got from an HTML tutorial website, however, we changed it significantly from its original design. We started by deciding how to categorize the content of the site, then made a series of subpages containing the content. After that it was a lot of trial and error to see what looked the best.

What features/capabilities are on this new site that we didn't have on the old site?

One nice feature that this website has is an enhanced user interface, with more interactive content. We also added the blog section, which includes articles like this one. Another cool feature is that most of the pages have an image from past CLIP events that changes each time the page is loaded.

Where did you all learn to do coding and web design?

I learned a lot of HTML and web design basics from the tutorials at Khan Academy, but a lot of the learning came from the hands-on experience of building the website. It was a large learning experience for everyone on the team. There’s a lot of subtleties that go into making a website that are hard to learn any other way than by making the entire thing mostly from scratch.

Any advice for current CLIP students or other alumni?

For CLIP students entering high school, the I found the Chinese courses at high school to be way too easy, even if you get into Chinese 4 or AP. If you want an easy A, then this is a great way to do it. But if you want to challenge yourself, it’s also a good idea to start another language, such as French or Spanish.

As for other CLIP alumni already in high school, make sure you find a way to keep your Chinese up if you don’t decide to take it in school. Don’t let those 9 years of studying go to waste. Cupertino is full of people who know how to speak Chinese, so it’s not hard to find someone just to have a quick Chinese conversation with.