Relevant, Reusable Data for Education Exercises

On this page is cataloged common data that may be useful to educators in constructing meaningful exercises. Often educators short on time use abstract data that lacks meaning to the student, or that requires the student to track down and extract his own data.

Fetch scripts are provided in some cases where the data is too large, changes periodically, or it wouldn't make sense to host it on python.org. The scripts are kept simple, so that students may benefit from reading them as well as the instructor, although it is expected that usually the instructor will extract the data once, perhaps repackage it and make it available in the classroom.

Contributions are welcome but content listed here must be distributable under an open license.

Content

• A list of two-letter country codes and their descriptive name.

Origin

• http://xml.coverpages.org/country3166.html

Fetch Script

• CountryCodeFetcher.py

Content

• A small set of cities tagged with the state within which they reside and their latitude/longitude.

Origin

• http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python/cities.xml

Fetch Script

• CityLocationFetcher.py

Content

• Dictionary of chemical elements from the Periodic Chart.

Origin

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements_by_atomic_number

Fetch Script

• ElementsFetcher.py

Content

• Dictionary of of about 180.000 english words with hyphenations

Origin

• http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/oxford_wordlists/Moby/mhyph/mhyph.txt

Fetch Script

• http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~martin.marcher/+junk/py-rds (bzr enabled)

• http://code.launchpad.net/~martin.marcher/+junk/py-rds

• world temperature measurements
• distances between cities
• how to say "I love you" in different languages
• list of people names
• list of species
• geological epochs
• Python dictionary of planetary properties
• bones of the body as a tree structure

Note

• If you know where to obtain the information, in a freely reusable form, please provide a link. Often finding it is harder than processing it.

Question

SQLite3 Data

Would it be OK to provide sqlite3 Databases?

I do have a source of hyphenations under public domain (about 180.000 entries), and I think that sqlite3 (which is in 2.5) would also be nice to use as a data source.

CategoryPythonInEducation