U2Ch1L4_Routers and Redundancy

Purpose: Students will discover how routers help manage the paths that different messages take. 
Vocabulary: Routers, Network Redundancy, DNS, IP Address

Video: The Internet – IP Addresses and DNS

Journal: Tracking a Postal Package.

Select a friend or relative that lives outside of the Bay Area, hopefully somewhere else in the US.
Pretend you would like to send them a package. Right now in your journal, address the package as though you were going to mail it to your friend – if you don’t know the exact address, thats ok, make it up.
Starting with leaving your house, write in your journal each time the package would change hands in order to reach its destination. Please feel free to make educated guesses as to how you think the package gets there. When you are done, please count the number of times a person, post office, computer, must make a decision about where to send the letter next.

Activity: Log on To Code.org U2Ch1L4 - Go to the Internet Simulator
Join a router . Ideally, you’ll have 3-4 classmates with you on your router.You can see the IP address of students on your Router. Send them a message.

• Ask the IP address of people on the other Router. Send them a message.
• Visit: "Router Tab / Log Browser"
  • How many messages dropped? Why?
  • How many Routers are being used to transmit the messages?
  • Do you see messages appearing multiple times?

• DNS: Allows us to identify a webpage by its name –eg. “rlsbluedevils.org.” -> this is the Domain Name.
• Domain names are easy for humans to understand – IP Addresses are easy for computers to understand.