Following my request for ideas the other day, for quick and interesting things to do with APIs and some design students, I had a few good responses…
Tom Stuart suggested using Pokéapi - The Pokémon RESTful API.
Adrian McEwan said he used International Space Station Current Location and Overpass Turbo (“a web-based data filtering tool for OpenStreetMap”) in a similar workshop. “Overpass-turbo to give you a (slightly) friendlier way to get GeoJSON for OpenStreetMap queries,” he said.
Adrian also mentioned Open Notify’s How Many People Are In Space Right Now API, which reminded me of How Many People Are In Space Right Now’s simple JSON file.
Eliot Hill suggested combining the Giphy API with a weather API, “for some kind of weird weather related gif-mess.”
Matthew Somerville wondered about “MapIt, some mapping API, Overpass - show all the swimming pools (or whatever) around a postcode?”
Alf Eaton pointed out that “There are a few nice examples at the end of tonicdev.com (including Open Notify)”.
Finally, Paul Pod said “not quite JS+API, but we had fun with cartodb.com and dumps of location data (it’s not fussy) to make visual things”.
Thanks to all of you! The only one I’ve tried so far is Eliot’s idea of a weather forecast using Giphy images; here’s the code for my first hasty bash at it. Quite nice as it’s both sort-of-useful and potentially silly.
I’ll probably make a final decision what to do after I’ve taught a couple of days, by which time I’ll have a better idea what kind of project will be both feasible and interesting.
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