Exploiting on-line data sources as the basis of programming projects

The Internet is an exciting place to find real, interesting, and interactive sources of data for use in the classroom. This data (often real world), can provide the basis of interesting projects for CS1 and CS2 courses. Additionally, the source or exchange protocol can be used as a gentle introduction for novice computer science majors to the myriad of data formats and emerging technologies available today. Presented here are a number of interesting data sources used during the 2004-2005 academic year in our own CS2 data structures course.