Digital Product Jam

This repository holds software development course materials for Digital Product Jam - a joint course run by Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and the Hebrew University.

Description

We all engage with digital products in daily life: we work with them, we express ourselves with them, communicate through them and discover information with them.

Students in the course will work with "real world" clients to learn about their audience and needs, and present them with solutions in the form of digital products, which they will design, develop, and deploy.

Course Outline

General structure of the course will be:

Learn web technologies
Meet the "client" organizations
Form teams
Pitch and plan the product
Build the product!

Course Goals

Experience working in teams of designers and developers similar to "real" work in the software industry
Experience design, development and product management with "real" clients while building working products for "social good" organizations
Learn the application of web technologies towards the delivery and deployment of a functional product

Discussion

Discussion Forum

We encourage you to ask questions and discuss technical issues with your classmates and the course staff. You can do that on the discussion forum for the course.

Office Hours

If you need help with any of the course materials, you can attend office hours. Office hours are held before classs on wednesdays or online via Google Meet, by emailing the course staff to schedule.

Assignments

All technical assignments will be added here

The majority of the grading of the course is related to team work. However, there are a number of assignments related to software development, where you are graded individually. These assignments must be submitted in the following way:

All code must be commited to your own code repository (which is either a "copy" or a "fork" of an original codebase for the assignment), hosted on GitHub
The application must be deployed and accessible via a public URL (this will happen automatically if Vercel is configured correctly for your application, but you should also verify on a per-assignment basis)
On completion, submit your task by adding a comment with the following information to the open issue for the task here:
- the URL to your GitHub repository
- the public URL of the working application
All tasks must be submitted by end of day on the Tuesday before the class (class is on Wednesday)

Individual assignments

Grading criteria

For assignments and also for teamwork, we grade your programming contributions based on the following criteria:

Usability the product
Review of the code (quality, abstractions, etc)
Evidence of solutions based on learning materials
Alignment with the design prototype
Alignment with overall product goals

Resources

Setup & getting started

Setup Guide

Slides

All slides from the lessons will be available here.

Bootcamp

If you have no prior experience in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, or, you want to refresh your knowledge, then it is recommended you take the following free courses at Codecademy, in the suggested order below.

Videos

In previous years, some videos were made to help explain specific concepts or integrations within the stater kit. The kit has changed somewhat from previous years, but the videos may still be useful:

product-jam-2025 / course

readme