Python Projects: Why Are
They So Important?
Building projects helped me bring together everything I was learning. Once I started building projects, I immediately felt like I was making more progress.
But it can be difficult to build Python projects for beginners.
Where do you start? What makes a good project? What do you do when you get
stuck? In this article, we’re going to talk about:
·
What you need to do before you build your first project.
·
What makes a successful project.
·
Strategies to use when you get stuck.
·
Examples of how to select the perfect project.
Tips
For You..
- Think about what you're interested
in and choose a project that overlaps with your interests to help with
motivation.
- Think about your goals in learning
Python, and make sure your project moves you toward those goals.
- Start small. Once you've built a
small project you can either expand it or build another one.
Why Building Projects Is
the Best Way to Learn
First, let's take a look at why a project-based learning
approach is so effective.
Portfolio: Use Your Projects to Help You Get a Job
The fourth and final reason that building Python projects works for beginners is that you can get a head-start on getting your first job (if that's your goal).
When employers are looking to hire entry-level candidates, they want to see that you have the key skills they need. A great way of achieving this is having a portfolio of relevant projects that demonstrate your skills.
If you’re looking for your first job in the field, employers are going to want to see tangible proof of your Python skills. In other words, they’re going to want to see what projects you’ve built.
If you're interested, you can read more about building a portfolio in our Data Science Career Guide (which while aimed specifically at people looking to get into data has advice that's equally valuable if your goal is another application of Python!).
Efficiency: Only Learn What You Need To
The second reason a project-based approach works is that there's
no gap between learning the skill and putting it into practice. You won't waste
time learning irrelevant things, because you’ll be actively trying to learn the
specific things you need to build your project.
This also means you will get where you want to go a lot faster.
If you’re trying to learn Python for data science by building data science
projects, for example, you won’t be wasting time learning Python concepts that
might be important for robotics programming but aren’t relevant to your data
science goals.
Motivation: Have the Momentum to Keep Going
First, building Python projects helps you learn more effectively because you can choose a project or topic that interests you.
This helps you stay motivated, which is important in preventing you from giving up when things get tough.
Problem-Solving: Learn
the Key Programming Skill
Problem-solving is a key skill when working with Python (or any
other programming language). When you're building a project, you're going to
have to come up with ways of approaching problems and solving them using
code.
Building projects thus forces you to practice what is perhaps
the most important skill in programming. And the more practice you can give
your brain in solving problems with code, the faster your skills will develop.
Before You Build Your
First Python Project
If you have some programming experience, you might be able to
dive straight into building a project. For most people, however, you'll need to
take a little time to learn Python basics first. The
idea here is to spend a small amount of time to learn these basics so you have
what you need to dive into projects.
Once you have learned some of the basics, it's normal to feel a
bit overwhelmed. You are learning something totally new, after all. Even though
you might not feel ready to start building a project, you probably are.
As a first step, you might like to try building a structured or
guided project. Structured projects are important because they allow you to
build something without having to start from scratch, which can be difficult if
you're a beginner.
At SoftwareTechIT, we include guided projects in every course which
are designed to help bridge the gap between learning from a course and being
able to build a project on your own. An alternative path would be following along
with Python tutorial blog posts that you can find
on either the SoftwareTechIT site or on thousands of other sites online.
What Makes a Great Python
Project for Beginners?
Now that it's time to build your Python project, you need to
decide what to build! Choosing what to build is extremely important — it
will impact whether your project will be successful or not. So what makes for a
great Python project for beginners?
Choose a Topic You're
Interested In
The first and most important factor is choosing a topic that
interests you. If you're interested in what you're building, you'll have more
motivation. Motivation is important because it's the momentum that carries you
through when you hit roadblocks (more on that later!).
Some people might be motivated by sports, others by a project
that relates to social good. Others might be motivated by something to do with
finance or the stock market. You might be obsessed with movies or a favorite TV
series. Whatever that "thing" is for you, that's what your project
should be about.
Think about your goals
The second factor to consider is what your overall goal is in
learning Python. If you want to get into web development, then a project that
builds a small web app is ideal. If you want to get into data science, then a
project that analyzes a dataset is a good choice. By aligning your project with
your goals, you'll be taking yourself closer to your eventual goal, rather than
going on a "detour".
Start Small
The last factor is not being too ambitious. It's natural to come
up with a grand plan, e.g. "I want to build a website that allows people
to build custom shot charts of using NBA data." This project idea sounds
like it is based around a motivating topic (presuming you like basketball) and
intersects with a goal (learning to make websites).
The difficulty with this project choice is that it's too big. In
order to execute it, a beginner will need to learn the basics of building an
online application, how to store and retrieve a large amount of data, how to
create shot-chart visualizations, and how to display them to a user upon
request.
It's much better to start with an extremely small and simple
version of your project and then add more functionality later. If you don't, it
will take a long time before you get any sense of accomplishment from finishing
and you might even give up. By starting small and expanding, you're much more
likely to have success.
 |
| Python Projects And Learn Python |
Start
from a small project and build it up over time
A better version of this project might be to create a simple web
app that will show a single NBA statistic for a small selection of players.
Once you've built that, you can choose to expand it out by adding more players,
more statistics, or any other extra piece of complexity that might appeal to
you.
Building Your Python
Project: Roadblocks and Difficulties
You've learned the basics of Python, completed a guided project,
selected the perfect topic for your first solo project, and you're ready to get
started. After about half an hour, you run into a problem: there's something
you don't know how to do!
I promise you that this will happen, and it's
not a nice feeling. No one likes getting stuck. That said, what you're being
presented with is an opportunity. These moments — roadblocks — are where the
learning actually happens. The key is knowing how to research to get yourself
around the roadblock and keep working.
The good news is that most of the time, someone has been in the
same situation — with the same roadblock — as you are in right now. What
you need to be able to do is find the resources left behind by those people.
Enter: Google (or your favorite alternative search engine).
How to Search for Help
The key to being able to find help is constructing a search for
information about a general version of the thing you want to do.
Say you have a Python dictionary where the keys of the
dictionaries are NBA player names and the values are how many games they've
played. You're trying to find out which player has the most games.
Searching for “how to find out which NBA player has the most
games in Python dictionary” probably isn’t going to be helpful, though. You
need to construct a general form for your question, which in
this case might be: "Find which key of a Python dictionary has the maximum
value."
In fact, that exact Google search seems
to bring us to a Stack Overflow question with
answers that look helpful!
Finding these general question forms can be tricky at first, but
this is an important skill that almost every programmer uses daily, so don't be
afraid to dive in there and get some practice. If you still can't find help,
you might need to break your problem down into smaller chunks and search for
each 'chunk' individually.
You'll find that most of your searches for help will end up on
one of three places:
·
An online tutorial that explains the thing you want to do.
·
Stack Overflow (an online
programming Q&A site) thread of someone in a similar situation.
·
The documentation for Python or the Python library you're using.
If you still aren't finding the answers, you should post your
question on a place like Stack Overflow or the SoftwareTechIT community, where others might be able to answer your question. You may be
surprised by how quickly other programmers will jump in to help out a beginner!
Python Project Examples
Now let’s look through a few fictional examples of people with
interests and goals, and see how they can choose a Python project that suits
their needs.
Data-Focused Danielle
Danielle wants to break into the data science space, and she's
identified that an entry-level job in data is going to be an analyst type
role.
She loves Star Trek, so she's decided that an ideal project
would be to analyze some data related to Star Trek episodes.
In order to start small and build up, she's going to find a data
set and summarize data about episodes (she'll probably use this list of
places to find free data sets for projects to get
started).
Once she's done that, she plans to expand her project by
creating some visualizations.
Fun Python project ideas
for building data skills:
·
Find out How Much Money You've Spent on Amazon —
Dig into your own spending habits with this beginner-level tutorial!
·
Analyze Your Own Netflix Data —
Another beginner-to-intermediate tutorial that gets you working with your own personal
data set.
·
Analyze Your Personal Facebook Posting Habits —
Are you spending too much time posting on Facebook? The numbers don't lie, and
you can find your numbers in this beginner-to-intermediate Python data project.
·
Analyze Survey Data —
This walk-through will show you how to get Python set up and how to filter
survey data from any data set you can find (or just use the sample data linked
in the article).
·
SoftwareTechIT's Guided Projects —
These guided projects walk you through building real-world data projects of
increasing complexity, with suggestions for how each project can be expanded.
·
Analyze Everything — Grab a free data set that interests you and
start poking around! If you get stuck or aren't sure where to start, our Python
courses are here to help you, and you can try them for free!
Gamer Greg
Greg wants to learn Python in order to build games for fun and
loves puzzles.
Greg has decided that he's going to learn Python by building
games using the Pygame library. He'll start by building a structured project
using some Pygame tutorials and then go onto
create a simple version of Rock–paper–scissors before
gradually increasing the complexity of his projects.
Building
a video game using Python
Cool Python projects for
game devs:
·
Rock, Paper, Scissors —
Start your Python learning journey with a simple but fun game that everybody
knows.
·
Build a Text Adventure Game —
This is a classic Python beginner project (it also pops up in this book)
that'll teach you a lot of basic game setup concepts that'll be useful for more
advanced games in the future.
·
Guessing Game — This is another
beginner-level project that'll help you learn and practice the basics.
·
Mad Libs — Learn how to make
interactive Python Mad Libs!
·
Hangman — Another childhood
classic that you can make in Python to stretch your skills.
·
Snake — This is a bit
more complex, but it's a classic (and surprisingly fun) game to make and play.
Website Wanda
Wanda wants to get a job building websites using Python, and she
loves fitness and exercising. She's going to start by following a tutorial
for the Python flask web framework, and then try to build a
very basic website that she can use to log each time that she exercises.
Once she's built this simple version, she plans to expand and
add new features one by one.
Simple Python projects
for beginner web devs:
·
URL shortener — This free video
course will show you how to build your own URL shortener like Bit.ly using
Python and Django.
·
Build a Simple Web Page with Django —
This is a very in-depth, from-scratch tutorial for building a website with
Python and Django that even has cartoon illustrations!
App Dev Aaron
Aaron wants to learn Python so that he can build apps for mobile
devices and the web.
Easy Python projects for
aspiring developers:
·
Password generator —
Build a secure password generator in Python.
·
Use Tweepy to create a Twitter bot —
This is bit more advanced, as you'll need to use the Twitter API, but definitely
fun!
·
Build an Address Book — This could start with a simple Python
dictionary or get as advanced as something
like this!
·
Create a Crypto App with Python —
This free video course walks you through some API use and Python to build apps
using cryptocurrency data.
Additional Python Project
Ideas
Still haven't found a project idea that appeals to you? Here are
a whole bunch more, separated out (roughly) by experience level.
These aren't tutorials, they're ideas that you'll have to dig
into and research on your own, but that's part of the fun! And it's part of the
natural process of learning to code, and even working as a programmer. The pros
Google for answers all the time — so don't be afraid to dive
in and get your hands dirty!
Python Project Ideas:
Beginner Level
·
Create a "Code" Generator that
takes text as input and replaces each letter with another letter, and outputs
the "encoded" message.
·
Build a "countdown calculator." Write
some code that can take two dates as input, and calculate the amount of time
between them. This will be a great way to familiarize yourself with Python's
datetime module.
·
Write a Sorting Method. Given
a list, can you write some code that sorts it alphabetically, or numerically?
Yes, Python has this functionality built-in, but see if you can do it without
using sort()!
·
Build an Interactive Quiz. Which
Avenger are you? Build a personality or recommendation quiz that can asks users
some questions, stores their answers, and then perform some kind of calculation
to give the user a personalized end result that's based on their answers
·
Tic-Tac-Toe by Text. Build a
Tic-Tac-Toe game that's playable like a text adventure. Can you make it print a
text-based representation of the board after each move?
·
Make a Temperature/Measurement Converter. Write
a script that can convert Fahrenheit to Celcius and back, or inches to
centimeters and back, etc. How far ca you take it?
·
Build a counter app. Take
your first steps into the world of UI by building a very simple app that counts
up by one each time a user clicks a button.
·
Build a number guessing game. Think
of this as a bit like a text adventure, but with numbers. How far can you take
it?
·
Build an alarm clock. This
is borderline beginner/intermediate, but it's worth trying to build an alarm
clock for yourself. Can you create different alarms? A snooze function?
Python Project Ideas:
Intermediate Level
·
Build an Upgraded Code Generator.
Starting with the project mentioned in the beginner section, see what you can
do to make it more sophisticated. Can you make it generate different kinds of
codes. Can you create a "decoder" app that reads encoded messages if
the user inputs a secret key? Can you create a more sophisticated code that
goes beyond simple letter-replacement?
·
Make your Tic-Tac-Toe Game clickable.
Building off the beginner project, now make a version of Tic-Tac-Toe that has
an actual UI, and that you play by clicking on open squares. Challenge: can you
write a simple "AI" opponent for a human player to play against?
·
Scrape some data to analyze. This
could really be anything, from any website you like. The web is full of
interesting data, and if you learn a little about web-scraping, you can collect
some really unique datasets.
·
Build a Clock Website. How
close can you get it to real-time? Can you implement different time zone
selectors, and add in the "countdown calculator" functionality to
calculate lengths of time?
·
Automate some of your job. This
will vary, but many jobs have some kind of repetitve process that can be
automated!
·
Automate your personal habits. Do you
want to remember to stand up once every hour during work? How about writing
some code that generates you unique workout plans based on your goals and
preferences? There are a variety of simple apps you can build for yourself to
automate or enhance different aspects of your life.
·
Create a simple web browser. Build
a simple UI that allows for URL enter and that can load webpages. PyWt will be
helpful here! Can you add "back" button, bookmarks, and other cool
features?
·
Write a notes app.
Create an app that helps people write and store notes. Can you think of some
interesting and unique features to add?
·
Build a Typing Tester. This
should show the user some text, and then challenge them to type it, timing them
for the length of time it takes them to finish, and scoring them on their
accuracy.
·
Create a "site updated" notification
system. Ever get annoyed with having to refresh a website to see if an
out-of-stock product has been relisted, or to see if any new news has been
posted? Write a Pythons script that automatically checks a given URL for
updates and informs you instantly when it identifies one. (Be careful not to
overload the servers of whatever site you're checking, though — keep the time
interval reasonable between each check).
·
Recreate your favorite board game in Python. There
are tons of options here, from something simple like Checkers all the way up to
Risk or even more modern and advanced games like Ticket to Ride or Settlers of
Catan. How close can you get to the real thing?
·
Build a Wikipedia Explorer. Build
an app that displays a random Wikipedia page. The challenge here is in the details:
can you add user-selected categories? Can you try a different "rabbit
hole" version of the app where each article is randomly selected from the
articles linked in the previous article? This might seem simple, but it can
actually take some real web-scraping chops.
Python Project Ideas:
Advanced Level
·
Build a Stock Market Prediction App. For
this one, you'll need a source of stock market data and some machine learning
chops, but tons of people have tried this, so there's a lot of source code out
there to work from.
·
Build a Chatbot. The
challenge here isn't so much making the chatbot as making it good.
Can you, for example, implement some Natural Language Processing techniques to
make it sound more natural and spontaneous?
·
Program a robot. This
requires some hardware (which isn't usually free) but there are lots of
affordable options out there, and tons of learning resources too. Definitely
look into Raspberry Pi if
you're not already thinking along those lines.
·
Build an Image Recognition App.
Starting with handwriting recognition is a good idea — SoftwareTechIT even has a guided
project to help with that! — but once you've got that down, you can
take it much bigger.
·
Make a Price Prediction Model. Pick
an industry or product you're interested in, and build a machine learning model
that predicts price changes.
·
Create your own Sentiment Analysis Model. Sure,
there are plenty of pre-built ones out there, but can you collect a large
corpus of text data and build one of your own? (Or, less challenging: optimize
an existing sentiment analysis model for the particular text you're analyzing.)
·
Create an interactive map. This
will require a mix of data skills and UI creation skills. Your map can display
whatever you'd like — bird migrations, traffic data, crime reports — but it
should be interactive in some way. How far can you take it?
Next Steps
Each of the examples in the previous section followed the advice
on choosing a great Python project for beginners:
·
Think about what you're interested in and choose a project that
overlaps with your interests to help with motivation.
·
Think about your goals in learning Python, and make sure your
project moves you toward those goals.
·
Start small. Once you've built a small project you can either
expand it or build another one.
Now you're ready to get started. If you haven't learned the basics of Python yet, I recommend diving in with SoftwareTechIT's PythonFundamentals .
If you already know the basics, there’s no reason to hesitate!
Now is the time to dive in and find your perfect Python project.
(If you're stuck for ideas, thisarticle contains lots of ideas as well as some resources for
structured projects.)
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