Inspiration

Getting the data to begin with is usually a much bigger challenge than telling the story within the data once you have it. The list below illustrates the kind of graphics that students ought to be able to produce once they've been through Fundamentals of Interactive.

Health and Science

Food Stamps - Marketplace made a pretty nice map of state by state policies. After one semester of fundamentals, we might not have the tools to do quite such a clean map, but we can certainly create a state by state policy map with details that appear on mouseover.

Geography of loss - a global look at the uneven toll of suicide from Science.

Business

FCC Consolidation -- to build this map you'd need a Shapefile or KML with the outlines of each FCC market. Fortunately, the FCC does publish that boundary data, so a simple map of one aspect of operating agreements is well within students' reach.
Whiskey Market Consolidation is probably out of reach but with an assist from a data coach an interactive version of this is definitely possible.

Urban

Map the highest pushcart vendor fees -- any second semester student should be able to create a fusion tables map of data like this. Getting individual lat/lon data for each point might be tricky, but this is a small enough data set that if the location information isn't included, a reporter can find it. After a semester of dataviz students should be able to approximate some of the design choices in the actual times map -- labeled points, for instance, and a good looking base map.

International

Ukrainian Trade is easy to chart if you have the data. Tools for beginners don't give you all the fine grained design control you'd need to refine the yAxis labels, but you can get fairly close.