19 Python Projects for Beginners

Python is used by 51% of developers and was ranked the third most popular programming language in 2024. It’s also the language of choice for many data scientists because it’s easy to learn, has excellent community support, and already has many libraries used in the field.

Whether your goal is to work in data science or software engineering, proficiency in Python will be an advantage during interviews and in your work. Practicing by working on various projects is a good way to improve this ability.

To help you get started, we have compiled 19 Python projects for beginners. In this list, we highlight the objectives of each and the skills you’ll learn by completing them. Let’s dive in.

Creating a text-based version of the traditional Tic-tac-toe game is a classic Python project for beginners. The board is created using underscores and pipe symbols, and players enter their moves by choosing numbers ranging from 1 to 9.

Working on this project helps beginners understand how to work with different data types, data structures, loops, and more. You can check out how to complete this project here. If you’re familiar with GUIs, you can also try implementing the GUI version of the game, as shown here.

This is yet another text-based game that’s a common one for Python newbies. The objective is to correctly guess the letters that form a word without making 6 incorrect guesses.

This project is a good opportunity to learn how functions, loops, and logic are implemented in Python. You can use this post as a guide to create your version of the game.

If you’ve ever struggled to come up with a new password when signing up for yet another app or website, this might be the perfect project for you. As the title suggests, the objective is to create a strong password generator that combines letters, numbers, and special characters.

For Python novices, this is an opportunity to learn how to import and use libraries, loops, inputs, and conditional statements. Check out how the project can be implemented here.

In the final text-based project on this list, the objective is to create a competition where users guess which of two popular personalities has the higher number of followers on Instagram. This game uses ASCII art to improve aesthetics.

This project offers a good introduction to creating your own modules in Python. It has different components including the art and game data that need to be retrieved and displayed at the right time. You can try the project on your own or follow this guide.

Turtle is many users’ first encounter with GUIs in Python and is great for learning the basics of implementing graphics when making applications. The goal is to draw four simple shapes in Python using Turtle.

This project will give beginners a chance to learn the basics of Python GUIs, including setting background display colors, drawing, and controlling the movements of graphical elements. Find out more on this post.

A Pomodoro timer is used to time work and breaks to ensure maximum focus. The timer has work and break modes of 25 and 5 minutes, respectively. This project is interesting in that you need to implement it using the TKinter package, which is used to create graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

This project is great for practicing your problem-solving skills as well as learning how to create GUIs in Python. As seen in this example, it also uses object-oriented programming.

The classic snake game never seems to go out of style, and replicating it is great practice. This will be a fairly large project and requires working with a GUI package. You’ll also need to program the controls and the interaction between the snake and the ball, its own body, and the boundaries of the playing area.

If you’re completely new to Python, you may find it easier to use the Turtle module, as in this example. However, you can also use the Pygame package, which offers a more complete game development experience.

Pong is a classic arcade game where two players control a paddle on either end of the screen. The goal is to ensure the ball doesn’t miss your paddle and go off-screen. This is yet another Python GUI project that you can implement using Turtle.

Implementing this project will help develop your problem-solving skills when working on large projects since you’ll have to solve many separate problems, including creating and moving paddles, detecting collisions, and keeping score. Check out how one person did it in this post.

In this project, the objective is to create a program that encrypts a message using what is known as a Caesar cipher. The program takes every letter in an input, e.g., a name, and shifts it by a specific number of characters in the alphabet. The program also has a decrypt mode so you can read encrypted messages.

This simple project is good practice for learning how to work with strings and for loops. You can check out a complete example here.

Unit converters are useful, and you can easily create your own using Python. To assemble this program, you must know the relationship between different units that measure the same quantity, e.g., miles and kilometers for distance.

For this project, you can choose any quantity, e.g., length, mass, time, etc., and write the code to convert it into different units. The program must be able to accept measurements in various units and convert them into a specified unit. In this example, the program can convert length and mass.

Many of us can’t go a day without using a calculator at least once. In this project, your goal is to create your own using Python. Your calculator must be able to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

If you choose a simple text-based approach, you’ll learn how to use functions, loops, and conditional statements. However, you can also use TKinter to create a calculator with a GUI.

The coffee machine project requires you to write the code for a coffee maker that can make three types of hot coffee drinks. These drinks are made using distinct quantities of milk, water, and coffee. They are also priced differently. The text-based interface prompts users to enter their choice of drink and the amount they are paying.

This project requires you to use your problem-solving skills to create a system that will be able to correctly mix drinks while keeping track of ingredient quantities and the amount of revenue collected. If you need some guidance, check out this example.

Writing a program that can identify whether an integer is a prime number or not is a common beginner Python project. There are also different ways of achieving this, and some methods are more computationally efficient.

One method of handling this project is to use a loop to check if the number is divisible by any number smaller than it. However, the second method only checks numbers up to the square root of the number being checked. You can find one solution for this problem on Interview Query.

This project is similar to the one on prime numbers. In this case, the objective is to identify if a year is a leap year. To implement, you’ll need to know the characteristics of a leap year and the rules that determine which years are leap years and which aren’t.

This Python project for novices is good for learning how to use conditional statements. Check out this example here.

This is yet another simple and fun game you can make using Python. You’ll need to create a GUI-based game with the objective of remembering as many US states as possible. Correctly entered state names are added to a map on the graphical user interface.

This project will show you how to load data from and export data to CSV files. It will also give you some practice with Turtle and show you how to include images as part of a GUI. You can find out more about this project here.

The NATO phonetic alphabet converter is a fun little project where you develop a program that takes in a series of letters, e.g., a name, and returns the letters’ equivalents in the NATO phonetic alphabet. The NATO phonetic alphabet is a set of 26 words used to ensure accurate communication in critical situations, e.g., in the military or by pilots.

Taking on this project requires dictionary comprehension, so you must know how to use dictionaries in Python. Check out how one person did their version of the project here.

A palindrome is a word that doesn’t change whether it’s read from right to left or left to right, e.g., civic, racecar, noon, level, etc. In this beginner Python project, your objective is to write a program that can accept a word as input and return whether it’s a palindrome or not.

The solution to this problem is fairly simple, but it will take some creativity to figure out the most efficient way of checking if the order of letters in a word remains unchanged in both directions.

Visualizing the history of an item or a subject is a simple yet interesting beginner project for anyone planning to work with data. The objective is to create a visualization in Python where users can see the timelines associated with some entity. For example, you could create a timeline of key events that shaped a country.

Working on this project will get you started working with some libraries commonly used in data science, such as NumPy, pandas, and Matplotlib. You can choose any series of events to visualize. In this example, one user creates a visualization for iPhone release dates.

This project is good for Python beginners ready to take on more challenging projects. Web scraping is a method used to extract data from web pages and something you may do regularly if your work involves data collection. In this case, your objective is to extract data from a fictional e-commerce site.

Working on this project will familiarize you with common libraries used in web scraping, such as Beautiful Soup, Requests, Scrapy, and Selenium. You can follow a comprehensive tutorial for this project here.

Python is one of the most practical programming languages you can learn today. Whether you intend to use it professionally or just want to work on cool projects, this language offers an experience that’s accessible to most beginners and supports many useful libraries. Python’s versatility means there is a lot to learn, and working on a wide range of projects will help you become an expert at using this language to create robust projects that offer good user experiences.

If you want more resources to help level up your Python skills, you can find other lists of Python projects on Interview Query, including this one for Python data science projects. You can also gain access to a Python learning path designed to help you prepare for interview questions, plus other interview preparation resources, including a question bank of Python interview questions, company interview guides, and mock interviews.

Learning Python is a fun, challenging, and rewarding experience, and we hope these Python projects for beginners will get you excited about the journey ahead.