How to interact with backend on click
This is probably a newb question, but I'm not very familiar with frontend stuff and I'm trying to at least determine what my starting point is with this. Basically what I want to do is store questions and answers in a database, and have a grid of boxes on the page. I want to be able to assign question/answer pairs to each box. After that, it starts with every box showing nothing, just a solid color. First click on a box shows the question, second click shows the answer. Can someone tell me what technologies I need to figure out to make that work?
What back-end technologies/languages/frameworks are you familiar with? If we're talking bare minimum, on the front-end you'll need to learn:
Hard to say if using jQuery (a JS with library with functions that make it easier to manipulate the DOM and make AJAX requests) will make this easier or harder than 100% vanilla JS. If I had to guess, I'd say it'd be easier to use jQuery.
At the root of it all, you will need to learn basic JavaScript. My recommendation is to first hack together a solution which does not talk to your backend. Just use a static set of questions and answers and get the user interactions right.
Two ways you can go about this:
If you have zero frontend experience, learn vanilla JS and try to make things work with vanilla JS. Break the problem down until you arrive at something manageable. Based on the title of your post, it seems a good starting point is simply to print some text when you click on a div.
If you have some experience with Javascript, give React a shot. The learning curve is steep, but once things "click" (no pun intended), it is pure magic. They have a good tutorial to help you get started: https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html.
Hook up your backend at the very end.