Python Coding Project Ideas for Beginners

Need to practice your Python coding skills but can’t think of a beginner-level project? Check out our seven Python project ideas!

Coding projects are the best way for beginners to get their first programming experience. In this article, I’ll suggest a few Python projects aimed at developing a variety of skills, like web scraping, building simple games, or even developing machine learning models.

Why Should You Do Your Own Project?

Let’s say you’ve taken several online Python courses, read a few tutorials, and are now familiar with Python basics. But would that be enough to land a Python programming job? No. Practical experience is everything when it comes to mastering a new programming language.

But how do you get this practical experience without a programming job? By doing several Python coding projects! Here’s why doing your own projects can be a good idea:

• You can follow your interests. You can select any project based on what intrigues you and what skills you want to build. Want to become a game developer? Start by coding some simple games. Want to become a data scientist? Build your first data science project with some basic predictive analysis and visualizations.
• You can build on the work of others. There’s a variety of standard Python projects for beginners, e.g. a dice-rolling simulator or a rock, paper, scissors game. If you are only starting your Python journey and don’t feel ready to build a project from scratch, you can find the code for these standard projects and just read through it, trying to understand each step. After a deep dive into several projects, you’ll be much better prepared for building your own project from scratch.
• You’re getting practical experience. Practice projects give you an opportunity to practice your coding skills without risking anything important. It’s like a playground, but where you are building something real and getting some real programming experience.
• Hands-on learning increases your motivation. When you’re learning a new programming language passively by reading guides and watching video tutorials, it’s hard to keep your motivation high. But when you are building something new on your own, it is very easy to get excited and code for hours without noticing how time flies.

As you can see, Python coding projects are essential for your successful entry into the IT world. Now let’s explore some examples of Python project ideas.

7 Beginner-Friendly Python Project Ideas

For each project idea, I’ll specify the functionalities to be developed and the skills required to perform it successfully. But don’t worry if you don’t have these skills yet. You can always take a learning track like Python Basics or Learning Programming with Python before jumping into the projects.

Without further ado, let’s move to the Python project ideas.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Got no playmate for rock, paper, scissors? No worries. Even with basic Python knowledge, you can write a short program allowing you to play against a computer.

Functionalities. The computer’s input should be random, so you’ll need to import the random module and use the random.choice() method for the computer to select between three options: “rock”, “paper” and “scissors”. You’ll also need to request user input and write a function to determine the winner based on the inputs from the computer and the user. Your function may just return “You won!” / “You lost!”, or you may also calculate the total score from a set of plays to determine a winner.

Skills. With this project, you’ll have a chance to practice writing conditional statements and defining functions. If you need to refresh your memory on these concepts, check out our basic Python courses: Python Basics Part 1, Python Basics Part 2, and Python Basics Part 3. These courses cover all you need to know for the game.

Hangman

This is another game you can play with your computer. Or you can share it with your friends and family so that they can play the game you programmed yourself! This one is a little bit trickier than rock, paper, scissors, but still not too difficult – especially with some guidance that you’ll easily find online.

Functionalities. In the hangman game, the computer chooses a random word (you’ll need the random module again!) and the player needs to guess this word letter by letter. Usually, the player has a limited number of attempts.

There will be a lot of things to keep in mind when writing this program:

• Keeping track of letters that the player has already guessed.
• After each attempt, showing the word with already-guessed letters and dashes in place of the letters not guessed yet.
• Showing the player which letters they’ve already tried (so that they don’t repeat themselves).
• Letting the player know the number of attempts left.
• Stopping the game when the word is guessed or all attempts are used.

Skills. With the hangman project, you’ll get a great opportunity to practice while loops, conditional statements, defining functions, working with lists, processing strings, and more. You should also be familiar with sets and how they differ from lists. The course Python Data Structures in Practice and the article  Python Lists, Tuples, and Sets: What’s the Difference? will be very helpful if you are new to these data structures.

If you are a fan of word games, you’ll love our interactive course Python Practice: Word Games. You’ll have the opportunity to practice your Python skills with fun and simple programming exercises.

Password Generator

Passwords should be difficult to guess. If you don’t want to create these difficult passwords yourself, you may use passwords suggested by Google or write your own program to generate passwords. I think the last option sounds really exciting, especially for novice programmers.

Functionalities. Basically, you need to write a program that will generate a random password of a predefined length. The characters of the password can be chosen from a long string that includes all the lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, and special characters. You may have additional requirements for your password, e.g. you may request your password have at least one uppercase letter or at least one special character.

Skills. This is a simple project, but you need to be familiar with how to process strings in Python, how to write for loops and conditional statements, and how to use the random.choice() method for generating a random password.

Web Scraping Program

With web scraping, you can basically get and store information displayed on the web. For example, you can get the number of Twitter followers for specific users, product descriptions, prices, reviews for certain products on Amazon, or links to profile images for specific GitHub users.

Functionalities. In the simplest version of a web scraping program, you may just extract necessary information from a specific webpage by providing an URL. However, often you’ll need more flexibility. For example, you may want basic information from Twitter, like the name, profile description, and number of followers for a specific list of users. Or you may ask a user to provide certain input (e.g. a Twitter username) and then output the requested information for this specific user. There are a number of Python libraries that make web scraping fast and easy, including requests, Beautiful Soup, and Scrapy. Check out this article for more information on these and other Python libraries for getting data.

Skills. A web scraping project will give you experience with processing HTML and XML pages. Depending on the project objectives, you may also need to know how to work with strings in Python. If you are new to this topic, check out our interactive online course on Working with Strings in Python.

Predicting Titanic Survivors

Titanic is a legendary machine learning project to practice basic data science skills. The objective is simple: build a machine learning model that predicts which passengers survived the Titanic shipwreck.

Functionalities. Even though there was obviously some element of luck involved in surviving, it looks like some groups of people were more likely to survive than others. Your model should rely on available passenger data – i.e.  age, gender, socio-economic class, etc. – to output a survival prediction for each passenger. You’ll use part of the available data to train your model, and then you’ll have the rest of the dataset available for testing your model and checking the accuracy of your predictions. There are a number of different models you can experiment with: logistic regression, random forest, decision tree, and more. Your final goal is to define the model that provides the highest prediction accuracy.

Skills. This project will test your ability to work with standard Python modules and libraries for data science. You’ll use the csv module to get data from a .csv file, pandas to work with tabular data, and scikit-learn to build machine learning models. If you don’t have much experience with these libraries, check out our Python for Data Science learning track.

Photo Manipulation with Python

What about coding your own Photoshop in Python? Sounds cool, right? This project is not trivial, but with some guidance and pre-written code (available online), you can write your own program for photo manipulation in Python.

Functionalities. Basically, your program will take a photo and provide the functionality to apply an image filter, change the contrast, brightness, and blur of an image, and then output the edited photo. Note that Python processes images as numpy arrays, where each pixel has its X and Y coordinates and a value representing its RGB-coded color. So, you’ll need to import the NumPy library for this project.

Skills. To manipulate images with Python, you need to be comfortable with numpy arrays. If you are not familiar with this concept, check out this introductory guide to NumPy in Python. You may also need to define your own class within this photo manipulation project. This article defines simple steps for creating your own class in Python.

Tic-Tac-Toe

This is another game project, but it is more advanced than the ones we’ve already explored. The game starts with a 3×3 square grid and involves two players. One player puts Xs on squares and another player puts Os. The player who create a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line of three consecutive Xs (or Os) wins.

Functionalities. First of all, you’ll need to create a board. Your program should be able to track available moves, check the validity of the player’s moves, track board representation after each move, and return the winner of the game.

Skills. With this project, you’ll be able to practice some basic Python skills, like writing while loops and defining conditional statements and functions. You’ll also need some more advanced skills, such as creating custom classes in Python.

Practice Python with Your Own Beginner Projects!

Python coding projects are great for consolidating your knowledge and skills. However, if you first want to refresh your knowledge of Python basics or get familiar with more advanced concepts, interactive online courses provide a great opportunity to learn and practice at the same time.

If you want to get a comprehensive skill set in Python while keeping the learning process fun and interactive, I recommend the following learning tracks:

• Python Basics is a mini-track perfect for complete beginners. The track includes 229 coding challenges that cover the basics of Python syntax, variables, if statements, loops, functions, and basic data structures (including lists, dictionaries, and sets).
• Learning Programming with Python is a learning track aimed at newcomers who want to understand foundational Python and then go beyond the basics and learn more advanced programming concepts. In addition to Python basics, it covers Python data structures and built-in algorithms in Python.

Thanks for reading, and happy learning!