I had a conversation with my wife, who's training to do front end development, just this morning. Our product is going to have Javascript. It's going to have JQuery. After that, probably not too much. I explained to her the difference between an app and a web site (we're making a web site). There is only one app-like section. Even that is vanilla JS.

All that said, I told her to pay attention in the Udacity backbone class. General framework knowledge should let her generalize using JS.