Activity 1.2.2 Wikipedia That
Introduction
Tonya has an idea for an
app. She wants to be
able to command her
phone with a key phrase
like "look up such-andsuch" and have it fetch
both the Wikipedia
entry and a page of
search results from her
favorite search engine.
She's brainstormed
some ideas and selected
one. She documented
her work in her
engineering notebook,
and the first page about
this project is shown
here. You're going to
help her by creating
your own
implementation of the
design.
You will learn about the
parts of a URL, the
address for fetching
something from the
web over the Internet.
1. Consider the following URL. Identify the different parts of the URL.
http://tumblingPhotos.com/search/flower?login=no
2. The domain name and path of a URL often inform you about the reliability of the
information retrievable from the URL.
a. Describe what you might be able to infer from the URL above.
b. What might be inferred about the content, if the URL has one of these
top-level domains or subdomains?
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Introduction to Computer Science Activity 1.2.2 Wikipedia That – Page 1
Top level domain
Inference
.org
.gov
.mil
.ca
Subdomain
Inference
k12.ca.us
druthers.edu
3. In addition to inferences made directly from the URL, a person can use other
clues to determine the reliability of information found on the Internet.
a. Describe some of those clues.
4. In the excerpt of Tonya's engineering notebook, you can see her description of
the problem and the beginning of her brainstorming for solutions.
a. Comment on the quality of her documentation based on this excerpt.
b. What is good about it?
c. What could be better?
5. Tonya selected a solution similar to the idea recorded as #2 during her
brainstorming. However, she has decided to begin by creating the idea sketched
as #1 to get started. The interface will require two WebViewer components from
the User Interface drawer.
a. What other App Inventor components will you need to create the interface
shown in her diagram?
6. You will be creating the functioning interface in App Inventor.
a. Decompose the problem into several tasks and describe the tasks. Use
your Engineering Book
7. Describe the code necessary for the first programming part of the task using
natural language or pseudocode.
8. Create the solution.
a. Record your development process. Your final result should include three
or more versions of your program as AIA files, each demonstrating
incremental progress toward the solution.
b. Submit your work to your teacher.
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Introduction to Computer Science Activity 1.2.2 Wikipedia That – Page 2
Hint #1: Use a browser to submit a Google search or to find a Wikipedia page.
Examine the URL. Try this again with a different query and see if you can identify
the pattern for each website.
Hint #2: Wikipedia and Google search each change any spaces in the query string
to another character. You could use the replace all text block to do this.
Similarly, there are blocks that will let you capitalize the first letter for Wikipedia.
However, once you identify the pattern used for URLs by each of these websites,
you might experiment to see what happens if you violate the pattern in specific
ways.
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Introduction to Computer Science Activity 1.2.2 Wikipedia That – Page 3