This article is an idea list of Python projects for Beginners.
It’s easy enough to learn Python using the vast number of resources available online, however this does not make you a Python programmer. Simply “knowing” python isn’t enough. You need to have actually written your own project with your own two hands. Projects which you simply copied off some Tutorial or guide don’t count I’m afraid.
Reminder: The projects listed below are merely suggestions and fun ideas for programmers who aren’t sure what project to undertake. These are not tutorials for the project. Although the links in the “suggested libraries” section will lead to tutorials which explain how to use that library, thus helping you towards the project as well.
Some of the projects below are going to be quite challenging, but you shouldn’t let that stop you. If you don’t challenge yourself, you’ll never be able to improve. Research the topic carefully, look up python tutorials from others who have done similar projects and code it yourself (don’t copy paste).
Python Projects Ideas for Beginners
Random Password Generator: A pretty simple and interesting project for a beginner to undertake. Your goal is create a random password generator that generates “strong passwords”. A strong password may include capital letters, numbers and special symbols.
Suggested Libraries: Random
Bonus Objective: Find a way to encrypt and decrypt this password as well for extra security.
GUI Calculator: Building a calculator is a fairly simple project that many beginners undertake in way or the other. However, in this project your goal is to create an actual calculator with a GUI (complete with buttons and a display screen). It may sound tough, but it’s actually pretty easy.
Suggested Libraries: Tkinter or PyQt for the GUI.
Bonus Objective: Convert it to a distributable application, and have your friends use it too!
Rock, Paper, Scissors Game: Another popular beginner project since it involves a game that is universally known. The objective is simple, you will create a computer opponent against whom you play. The opponent will randomly select one of three options to battle you.
Suggestion Libraries: Random
Bonus objective: Use a GUI to display the result and pictures to represent the choices made.
Building a Chat-bot: A chat bot is a very popular project choice that many beginners dream of making. A chat bot is kind of bot which is able to hold a conversation with a Human person. Typically used in call-centers and customer service to replace Humans (to varying degrees). Building a fully-functioning chat-bot is hard work and requires concepts of Machine Learning and AI, but you can come up with a simpler version (with predefined responses) and leave the Artificial Intelligence part for later.
Creating an RPG Adventure Game: The simple version of this involves a Text based adventure game (no graphics involved). The game goes something like this: You start the game and are given options like “Ahead of you is a forest”, “To the left is an abandoned village” etc and you pick an option. The game continues on like this, prompting you at every turn. You can add advanced elements like items, enemies, weapons and battles, all which happen through text on the console window.
Bonus Objective: You can go to the next level and try creating a proper 2D RPG game with graphics. You can do so using the Game development framework Pygame. It’s a bit advanced and only for people willing to take up a challenge.
Plagiarism Checker: The objective is quite simple. This program will take a paragraph of essay length piece of text and determine whether it has been plagiarized or not. How advanced you make this depends upon you. As an idea, you could have your program use the “keywords” in the article (Like the most repeated words and title) to search for similar articles online and then compare the texts.
Suggested Libraries: BeautifulSoup or Scrapy for a Web-based approach.
You can try this free plagiarism checker online to verify the accuracy of your program.
Automating your computer: Many people must have something or the other that involves alot of repetitive work. In cases like this you should try automating it using automated libraries in Python. As reference, I created a similar program myself once to automate the process of downloading some study material (500+ files) off the internet. Instead of having to individually download them, I automated the whole task with various options to customize what would be downloaded. I used the two libraries mentioned below.
Suggested Libraries: Pyautogui (Keyboard and Mouse automation) and Selenium (Web automation).
Web Scraping: Chances are you have a hobby that involves you checking a website for hourly/daily/weekly updates. Some examples of this can be weather forecasting or sports updates. If you have a hobby like that, why not automate it by automatically having a bot extract the data at regular intervals? Pick a website of your choosing and build a bot that extracts that requires the information you want and saves it in a file or displays it.
Suggested libraries: BeautifulSoup or Scrapy (To extract Data) and Requests (To connect to the websites). You may also require Selenium at some points for Web automation.
Personalized Feed: Another project based of the web scraping library BeautifulSoup. If you use Chrome and Google search often, you’ll have noticed that they sometimes have “personalized feeds” ready for you. They track your search and will automatically suggest articles based off that. Here you will make your own version where you take a few keywords from a user and automatically return a list of articles that match those keywords. Example: Taking “Python” as a keyword will create a feed with articles about Python.
Suggested Libraries: BeautifulSoup or Scrapy (To extract Data) and Requests (To connect to the websites)
Custom Encryption system: Everyone at one point or the other tries to develop a “secret code” whether it’s in writing, speech or programming. Your goal is to create a program that encrypts any text passed to it, outputting it in a format that doesn’t make sense to anyone. You can either come up with your own Encryption system, or you can look for a cryptography python library.
Bonus Objective: The Encryption system should be able to decrypt the encrypted text as well. Otherwise their isn’t really much point to it.
Graph Plotter: A nice beginner project to undertake in python if you want something interactive and visually pleasing. Basically involves take input from the user and drawing up graphs using that value. You can give this project a theme, like housing/living expenses and create separate graphs for each month of the year and the different costs for each department (clothing, food, bills etc).
Suggested Libraries: Matplotlib and Tkinter.
Bonus Objective: Create a load/save function that allows you to save the data that you entered in text files.
TCP Chat Client: Create a TCP connection between two computers, or even on the same computer by creating a server and a client. The client will send a message to the server which will then take some action (such as responding or forwarding it to another client). It’s not as hard as it looks and there are many tutorials out there explaining how to do this.
Suggested Libraries: Socket library
If you have any other suggestions for our Python Projects for Beginners list, feel free to share them in the comments section.
This marks the end of the Python Projects for Beginners article. Any suggestions or contributions for CodersLegacy are more than welcome. Questions regarding the article content can be asked in the comments section below.
