Orange Belt: Web Development
Web Development & Design in Wellesley
HTML, CSS and JavaScript — and a site on the internet with their name on it.
- Boston Parents Family Favorite seven years running
- Macaroni Kids Favorite 2026
- FIRST LEGO League & VEX Judges Award
- State finalists, FLL & VEX
- STEM.org accredited
- CSTA & NGSS aligned
Not a drop-in coding club. A ten-month program with a cohort, a competition team, and a monthly report that shows you exactly what your child built and why it mattered.
What your child leaves with
A portfolio
Working apps, games, robots and websites they built themselves — not a certificate of attendance. Everything is saved to their own profile.
A team
The route into our VEX and FIRST LEGO League competition teams, with a real season, a capped roster and tournament results.
A transcript
A written report every month explaining what they covered, the concept behind it, and what comes next. A fuller one at the end of each belt.
Orange Belt · iCode of Wellesley2026/27 year
Web Development & Design — the Orange Belt
- Time
- Two hours a week, same day and time, across the ten-month program
- Group size
- Around six students to one instructor
- Length
- Ten months to complete a belt. Most students go on to the next one. 80 hours of instruction across the year.
- Start dates
- New cohorts in September, November, January and April. Seats are capped.
- Stage
- Typically ages 8 and up
- Entry
- After a text-coding belt, or by evaluation.
- Reports
- A written report every month, and a fuller one at the end of each belt — see a real one
- Location
- 73 Central Street, Wellesley
See Orange Belt class times
Book a free evaluation
Not sure this is the right belt? The free evaluation exists to answer exactly that — we place by what a student can do, never by age alone.
The web is the only platform where a child can build something and have a grandparent open it an hour later on a different continent. The Orange Belt takes that seriously: HTML and CSS first, then JavaScript so the page does something, then hosting so the page is genuinely live.
The design half is not decoration. Photography, graphic design, UI and UX principles and CSS animation are taught as craft, because a site that works and looks wrong is still a site nobody uses. AI comes in as image editing and as vibe coding — generating web code from a prompt, then being made to explain what it generated.
What students actually learn
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript — written by hand, in Visual Studio
- Web design, UI and UX principles, and advanced CSS animation
- Photography and AI-assisted image editing
- Graphic design in the AI era
- Databases, web hosting and vibe coding — putting a real site online
The year, sprint by sprint
The Orange Belt runs in sprints across the school year, each one building on the last and ending in a final project.
- Introduction to Web Development
- Styling with CSS
- Photography and AI Image Editing
- Javascript
- Midterm
- Graphic Design in the AI Era
- Advanced CSS Animations
- Web Hosting and Vibe Coding
- Final Project
What they finish with
- A dynamic website, designed, built and hosted
- A photography portfolio
You will know exactly what your child learned
Most parents six weeks into a coding class cannot say what their child has actually learned. A written report arrives every month: the topics covered, the concept behind each one in plain language, what your child actually built, where they found it easy and where they had to push, an instructor’s specific observation, and what is coming next. At the end of the belt there is a longer completion report — the whole ten months as a narrative, the skills portfolio, the capstone, and the natural next step.
The competition team runs alongside it
Our VEX and FIRST LEGO League teams are not a separate Saturday activity. A team place runs parallel to the belt, so the season feeds the same progress record — the robot goes in the portfolio and the season goes on the transcript. Rosters are capped and we hold the cap.
- Entry — FIRST LEGO League Explore · VEX IQ intro. Grades 2–4, About 16 weeks, 1.5 hours a week.
- Core — FIRST LEGO League Challenge · VEX IQ competitive. Grades 4–8, About 20 weeks, two hours a week.
- Advanced — VEX V5. Grades 8–12, About 20 weeks, two hours a week, eight students to one coach.
A place is conditional on being an enrolled student, and tryouts run in September. See the teams, rosters and season dates.
The question parents actually ask
“Isn’t web development a solved problem now that AI writes the code?”
AI writes web code very well and confidently produces code that does not do what you asked. The students who benefit are the ones who can read HTML, CSS and JavaScript well enough to spot the difference — which is precisely what this belt builds. We teach the AI workflow deliberately, in the second half, once they can tell whether the answer is right.
If it is not working
Four sessions — about a month — then decide.
If your child is not engaged after four sessions, tell us and we refund the balance and release the seat.
How this differs from a club
A club is one hour a week for ten weeks, in a larger group, on a single topic — a good way to start and a good second activity. The Belt Program is two hours a week across a ten-month year, in a group of about six, with a written progress report every month and a capstone project. It is the deeper commitment and the one most families end up in. We teach this subject both ways: the Web Design & Development club is the ten-week version, and is a sensible place to start. The Orange Belt is the year-long one.
If two hours a week is too much right now
Studio — One hour a week, ongoing. A flexible, AI-driven path with its own milestones, supervised by an instructor. The on-ramp for families who cannot give us two hours a week yet. Students move across to a belt when they are ready. It is a different product rather than a shorter belt, which is what keeps the belt itself meaning the same thing for every student who finishes one.
Questions
How is this different from the Web Design club?
The club is ten weeks and gets a page built. The Orange Belt is ten months and gets a site designed, animated, made dynamic with JavaScript, and hosted — plus photography, graphic design and the AI workflow. It is the difference between making a web page and being able to make web pages.
Is this coding or design?
Both, deliberately, and students lean one way or the other. The final project needs the two to meet, which is usually the most useful lesson in the year.
What comes after the Orange Belt?
Yellow — mobile app development in C# — where the interface thinking transfers straight across and the language gets harder.
Where you’ll be
iCode of Wellesley · 73 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02482
781-291-3131
Five minutes from Wellesley Middle School and a short drive from Schofield, Bates, Hardy, Hunnewell and Upham. Street parking on Central Street, plus the Municipal Way lot behind the building for pickup.
Ready to start?
Book a free evaluation and we will tell you honestly which belt your child belongs in — or go straight to the Orange Belt class times.
Book a free evaluation
See Orange Belt class times
The ten belts, in order
Students move up the ladder as they are ready, not on a timetable. Most join partway up — the free evaluation is how we work out where.
- Junior Belt — Junior STEAM
- Foundation Belt — Scratch Coding & AI Foundations
- White Belt — Robotics, VEX & 3D Printing
- Gray Belt — Minecraft & Roblox Coding
- Orange Belt — Web Development & Design — you are here
- Yellow Belt — Mobile App Development
- Green Belt — Python, Drones & AI
- Red Belt — Game Development
- Blue Belt — Networking & Cybersecurity
- Black Belt — Java & AP Computer Science
