I don't want my young kids being exposed to a lot of trash online. But we like to laugh at funny pictures/memes together. So, one weekend I built a primitive tool that lets me share funny images with them: cleanhumor.net

I have a python script that pulls down posts from /r/funny. Reddit has some filtering options in their API, which I use. My script then rejects any that have caption words on my blacklist. It also does OCR to look within the image, and applies the blacklist there, too.

The remaining images I review manually. They show up on my phone along with large "accept" and "reject" buttons. When I click accept, the image and caption become available on that little website I made for my daughters. Many images aren't funny, and I personally still wade through lots of trash. But overall it has been fun for my family.

Very cool process. I like the resulting site. Now if you could only add an additional “possibly be funny” filter :)

It sounds like a well done class! I've seen that many lectures follow a pattern of starting in the low-level details of a topic and slowly working up to something useful by the end. I find I don't appreciate or particularly remember the details because I don't understand the motivation. So, I prefer an approach which starts out with the big picture of what cool thing is possible, and then the details take on more value and meaning for me.

This is huge. It's difficult to learn the process of solving a problem without having a deep understanding of the problem itself first.