[jfarmer]

I've been involved in coding education for about 7 years and this is the approach I've always taken. It works!

At https://www.missionbit.com/ I taught a web development class for a while and we'd start with a pre-built but very simple web application. It was a "social wall" that displayed a list of messages and had a textbox that let people create new messages.

It used a real database, was ready to deploy on day 0, but did only that one thing (two endpoints, one database table, etc.).

Over the class students would add new features (liking, sorting, user authentication, etc.).

It works well if the project(s) connect!