Good easy to use api with a dataset for exam

Question

I'm teaching a course in app development at bachelors level (3rd year college/university). Each year the students exam is to make an app which have some basic functionality and targets an open API. For example an app that can search imdb api, show movies, rate etc. This year I am looking for a new open dataset/api online which i can give out in the exam.

Preferably there should be no requirement for registration, and there should be a couple of "easy to use" requests you can do to get JSON data back from http requests done against the dataset.

The domain can be anything that you can concievably write an app with some basic functionality against. Of course the license should be allowed for personal use, but these are private assignments that won't be publicly shared. Previous years i have used the imdb open api, and a crypto website api.

Answer 1

The Internet Archive

One of the single biggest fully open data repositories on this planet. To cite their About page:

Today our archive contains:

• 279 billion web pages
• 11 million books and texts
• 4 million audio recordings (including 160,000 live concerts)
• 3 million videos (including 1 million Television News programs)
• 1 million images
• 100,000 software programs

I especially can recommend loosing oneself in the Netlabels branch of their audio section, but I digress... Unfortunately, their API documentation is not as well developed as their collection. The best I can offer are

• Developers - a summary blog post collecting several entry points to programmatically interact with their collections
• JSON API to archive.org servers - stating that &output=json makes every collection page machine readable, and supporting tools to discover indices/browse sub-collections.