Abstract:

Over the years the world of informatics developed rapidly and to some extent brought changes to the education of programming. Although new programming languages and concepts were introduced to every level of teaching informatics and even extended the subject to primary school pupils, the curriculum and related tasks seem resistant to change. The traditional programming tasks may be useful to introduce a new concepts like loops, conditions, arrays to students, but they fail to engage students on deeper levels. The concept of web scraping is nearly coeval with the appearance of the World Wide Web. To put it simple the technique was invented to effectively collect data from the Internet and is widely used on industrial level. This paper deals with the topic of web scraping from educational perspective and makes an attempt to find its place in high school programming. To build a simple web scraper students must use their knowledge regarding HTML code and the previously mentioned basic programming concepts, therefore offering a purpose to use their programming skills in practice. Web scraping can be considered as one of the first steps to let students work with genuine data collected by themselves. To assist our study, we chose the Python language because besides its current popularity on the field of education it provides the necessary features and modules for web scraping. Regarding documentation, we chose JupyterLab to present the general structure of such project in a clearly arranged, easy to follow form.

Keywords:

JupyterLab, web scraping, Python, deep learning, project-based learning.