This lesson introduces the idea of web scraping using the BeautifulSoup Python library. Students should have some familiarity with HTML structure before the lesson, but it will be important to review those concepts. Web scraping can theoretically be used to find data from almost anywhere, so hopefully the students will find interesting ways to use it.
Complete a warm-up activity to kick off the meeting. This warm-up is designed to review some HTML. Students should have some familiarity with it, but they may need assistance.
Present the Web Scraping PowerPoint Presentation. Review the presentation ahead of time, including the notes in the slides. There are several animations.
The activity walks through the construction of an information-finding program that searches Wikipedia. This should reinforce all of the concepts from the PowerPoint.
The challenges task students with building on the information-finding application.
| Activity | Time |
|---|---|
| Warm-up Activity | 20m |
| PowerPoint | 15m |
| Break | 5m |
| Code-Along | 50m |
| Challenges | 30m |