{blue}shift interview : Lesson Plan

An introductory raspberry pi exercise: scraping and visualizing earthquake data.

Learning Objectives

This lesson will introduce beginner coders to several computing concepts such as:

the command line
git and github
Data and APIs
clients and servers
relative and absolute paths, plus URLs

Key Skills

By the end of the lesson students will be able to:

navigate through their directory structure on the command line
clone a github repository and examine its contents
open a file in a text editor
interpret a path, including identifying relative and absolute paths
interpret the anatomy of a URL
read and configure a python script to write data fetched from an API to a location in their directory
start a local web server to load a local HTML document, visualizing scraped data

Prior Knowledge

It is assumed that students have knowledge in:

text editors
finders / file explorer graphical interfaces
web browsers

Resources

It is also assumed that students are using internet-connected raspberry pis installed with terminal, python, git, a text editor and a web browser.

Lesson Schedule

The lesson will consist of a 20 minute framing talk for all students, following by a series of remarks introducing practical coding concepts and subsequent 5-10 minute hands-on workshops in which students explore and experiment with key concepts.

The instructor and support staff, along with any advanced students, will be available to support students during their workshop sessions.

Time	Activity
0	Introduction, data, processors
5	Hard drives, local and relative paths, URLs
15	Clients, servers and web APIs
20	Github and `git clone` [workshop 1]
30	Python, requests and `get_earthquakes.py` [workshop 2]
45	Web servers with `python -m http.server` [workshop 3]
55	Conclusions

Repository

get_earthquakes.py

Examining request URL
Printing fetched data
Writing fetched data to file

visualize_earthquakes.html+

Relative path to get_earthquakes.py JSON output
Viewing site in browser on local web server (python -m http.server)

Key Scripts and Commands

git clone git@github.com:robisoniv/earthquakes.git

earthquakes/scrape/get_earthquakes.py

earthquakes/visualize/*

johnx25bd/earthquakes