At App Academy you will learn many things about Ruby, Rails, JavaScript and React+Redux. All of these things are programmatic and similar in nature, but there are other important aspects of web-development besides being a l33t hacker and they include presentation and design. Presentation and design are captured by HTML (structure) and CSS (styling).
Instead of trying to cover a very broad topic over the course of a few days we will be learning HTML and CSS incrementally over the course of the first three weeks of the curriculum. For these three weeks we will start most days (excluding assessments) with a short (about 15 minutes) HTML/CSS exercise to review the topics covered the night before. These will be very simple and are an excellent time to ask TAs questions about the material.
We will kick off week 4 with a full-day HTML/CSS project to review all the material we've covered thus far. At the end of the day we aim to have a good handle on the HTML and CSS principles and continue to practice as we progress through the course.