Full-Stack Web Development Study Day for High-School Students

Event: Study day (giornata di approfondimento) for Liceo di Mendrisio, USI Faculty of Informatics

Date: 11 November 2025

Role: Lead instructor

Audience: Fourth-year students of Liceo di Mendrisio on the informatics elective track

A one-day study session (giornata di approfondimento) on full-stack web application development for high-school students, held at the USI Faculty of Informatics on 11 November 2025. I led the day together with Valerie Burgener and Davide Paolo Tua, my colleagues at CodeLounge, the research and development group of the Software Institute.

The study day

The Faculty of Informatics welcomed five fourth-year students from Liceo di Mendrisio enrolled in the school’s elective path in informatics. The day introduced them to web application programming from a full-stack perspective: the front end, that is the visible part of an application that users interact with, and the back end, which handles the application logic, data management, and communication with the database. Through a mix of theory and hands-on practice, the students explored how the architecture of a modern web application fits together, live-coding a small application with a Python back end built on FastAPI↗ and a browser front end talking to it over a REST API.

Students of Liceo di Mendrisio coding on their laptops in a classroom at the USI Faculty of Informatics, while an instructor live-codes a Python back end projected on the wall — Live-coding the back end with the students of Liceo di Mendrisio at the USI Faculty of Informatics (photo: USI)

The initiative is part of the established collaboration between the Faculty of Informatics and Liceo di Mendrisio, which for several years has offered discovery, in-depth study, and orientation opportunities to students interested in informatics.