you should let your students know about the Modernizr.js library. http://diveintohtml5.org/detect.html
http://www.modernizr.com/
because you still need to employ the progressive enhancement techniques that us skilled flash developers use to enable deeplinking and seo. you need to teach your students the principle of failing gracefully, and modernizr helps a lot.

you still need to know javascript to take full advantage of HTML5. once you use it to detect functionality, you use it to produce for that functionality (e.g., the canvas tag and drawing). all it's really lacking is a good GUI dev tool, and Adobe is working on that (see their Edge product in Labs). i'm not surprised your student had to use complex js code, but i have to wonder if that code was more complex than just using modernizr and failing gracefully for platforms that lack support.