Masters conversion students arrive with strong disciplinary backgrounds but often without prior web development experience. This module meets them at that point and moves fast: twelve weeks from the fundamentals of how the web works to deploying a full-stack application with a React front end and a Django API behind it.
The module is designed around the belief that the best way to understand a technology is to build something with it that matters. Each topic is introduced with just enough theory to make the practical work legible, then students build, with increasing independence, toward a substantial project that draws on everything covered.
Why it matters
Web application development is the lingua franca of software in industry. Whatever domain a masters student moves into after graduation, whether that is data science, research software, product development, or enterprise systems, the ability to read, build, and reason about web applications is a baseline professional competency. This module does not aim to produce specialists; it aims to produce graduates who are fluent.
Module design
The syllabus moves through three phases. The first establishes the foundation: how the web works, how HTML structures meaning, how CSS controls presentation, and how JavaScript adds behaviour. The second phase introduces the back end: Django’s model-view-template pattern, ORM-driven database access, and API development with the Django REST Framework. The third phase lifts to the front end framework layer: React’s component model, state management, and how a client-side application communicates with an API. Deployment and CI/CD close the loop, so students have a mental model of how their code reaches users.
Syllabus
- Module introduction and web architecture
- HTML5 and semantic structure
- CSS3 and responsive design
- JavaScript fundamentals: the DOM and events
- Asynchronous JavaScript and APIs
- Django basics: the MVT pattern
- Django ORM and database operations
- API development with Django REST Framework
- React and component-based UI
- State management in React
- Web application critique and analysis methods
- Project deployment and CI/CD
What students leave with
Students can build and deploy a full-stack web application from scratch, make informed architectural choices about where logic lives (client, server, or database), read and work with unfamiliar codebases, and participate in a modern web development workflow. For conversion masters students, this is often the module that makes the rest of the programme make sense.