Reflection

Explore a New API

Congratulations, you finished Lesson 1!

You’ve made incredible progress on building an app to display critical information about earthquakes in the world. You also learned a ton about how both humans and programs can interact with data sources. That was one of the most important skills of this lesson. An API like USGS returns earthquake data in JSON form, and as a developer, we can parse the JSON and display it however we choose in the user interface of our app.

Now we want you to apply what you’ve learned by exploring a new API that you may want to build into a future app project.

Search online for a different API that you may want to use in the future.

Explore what information they offer to developers and in what format. Think about how you could display this information within an app that would be helpful to an end user.

Share your findings on the discussion forum!

If you need help finding an API, check out these resources:

Programmable Web API Directory: http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory
Google APIs Explorer: https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#p/
Data.gov: http://data.gov