The best way to polish your Python skills is to build something. Here are 9 fun Python project ideas to get you started! Before you start on these projects, make sure your basic Python skills are sufficient, for example by following our Python tutorial for beginners.
Create a game
I bet you never considered creating a game with Python. But why not? There are awesome libraries that will help you develop games. Building a small game is a great way to practice loops, functions, and classes, and your kids, your partner, or your colleagues get something fun to play. For this Python project idea, there are several libraries to look at.
Pygame
Pygame is a cross-platform set of Python modules designed to write video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries.
One warning before you start: the original pygame package doesn’t have ready-made packages for the newest Python versions, and when I tried pip install pygame on Python 3.15, it failed while trying to build from source. Install pygame-ce (community edition) instead. It’s a maintained fork that you import exactly the same way, with import pygame, so every Pygame tutorial works with it:
pip install pygame-ceCode language: Python (python)Here are a few tutorials you can try:
- Making Games with Python & Pygame
- Game development with Pygame
- The official Pygame documentation, which includes several tutorials
Pyglet
Instead of Pygame, you may also look into Pyglet. It is a Python library for developing games and other visually-rich applications. You can start by following the official documentation.
Panda3D
Panda 3D is a game engine that includes graphics, audio, I/O, collision detection, and other abilities relevant to the creation of 3D games. Its core is written in C++, so it’s very fast. Lucky for us, we can use the library from Python!
Panda3D has been used to create commercial games as well as some open-source ones. If you always wanted to dive into 3D game programming, this is the time. Start with the official manual.
Build a website
This next Python project idea is a little less original, I admit, but it is an essential skill to have! Several frameworks help you build a Python-based website. One of the most well-known is Django. It’s very extensive and can be used to create complex websites. You can start with the official tutorial. It’s excellent.
Another option is Flask. It’s more lightweight and easier to start with while offering enough to create a relatively simple website.
Once you’ve got the basics, here are some ideas to create:
- Your own blog
- A simple online shop
- A shopping list
- A database of recipes, jokes, or inspirational quotes
Create a GUI with Tkinter
Python has a powerful base library to create GUI applications. Many people, including me, use Python mostly for scripting and for backend code. But there are actually quite a few Python GUI applications too!
The library is called tkinter. It comes with the Python installers from python.org, so there’s nothing extra to install there. If you installed Python with Homebrew or a Linux package manager, you may need to add it separately: brew install python-tk on a Mac, or the python3-tk package on Debian and Ubuntu. A nice tutorial to get you started can be found here, and the official tkinter documentation has the details.
Here are a few ideas you can build once you mastered the basics:
- A To-Do application
- A notes application
- A calculator
- A weather app (see tip #5 as well)
Build a web service
Another useful skill to possess is the ability to create web services using Python. There are several frameworks that make this task super easy. These are the most recommended ones:
- Falcon is completely focused on creating web APIs. It’s very fast.
- FastAPI is also focused on writing APIs and is one of the fastest API frameworks for Python
- Flask is a lightweight web framework, which is also suitable for creating services.
You can pick either. An advantage of Flask is that it’s multi-purpose: you can also use it to create websites.
An idea to get you started is to build a web service that serves jokes, either randomly or by category. For this purpose, I would recommend diving into sqlite3 as well. My SQLite tutorial will get you started.
Fetch data from the web
Python is ideal for fetching information from the web. There are some terrific libraries that will do all the grunt work for you. I’ll list my top 3 here.
Requests
Requests is a Python HTTP client. It makes web requests really simple. Many people prefer it over the other available options.
Just to show how easy requests can be, here’s some example code that asks the GitHub API for information about the CPython repository:
import requests
r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/python/cpython')
r.status_code
# 200
r.headers['content-type']
# 'application/json; charset=utf-8'
data = r.json()
data['full_name']
# 'python/cpython'
data['language']
# 'Python'Code language: Python (python)The json() method turns the JSON response into a regular Python dictionary, so you can work with it right away.
Scrapy crawler
If you want to fetch more than a couple of fixed URLs, you should look into Scrapy. It can be used to build a full-fledged web spider, that can discover new pages on its own within set limits.
Beautiful soup
Once you’ve pulled some HTML from a website, you need to parse it to get what you actually need. Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It is mighty powerful and can handle all kinds of HTML, even if it’s broken.
Automate a boring task
This might be the most useful project of all. Look for something you do on your computer over and over, and let Python do it for you. Some ideas:
- Rename a folder full of photos so the file names start with the date
- Sort your downloads folder into subfolders by file type
- Combine a bunch of CSV or Excel files into one report
- Check a web page every day and notify yourself when something changes
You’ll learn a lot about working with files, and for some tasks you’ll want to run external commands too. Start small: a script that saves you two minutes a day is still a win.
Build a command-line tool
Once you have a useful script, turn it into a proper command-line tool, with arguments, options, and a help text. The standard library has argparse for this, but Typer makes it even easier. It uses the type hints of your function to figure out the arguments:
import typer
def main(name: str, count: int = 1):
"""Greet NAME, COUNT times."""
for _ in range(count):
print(f"Hello {name}!")
if __name__ == "__main__":
typer.run(main)Code language: Python (python)Save it as greet.py, install Typer, and run it:
$ python3 greet.py Erik --count 2
Hello Erik!
Hello Erik!Code language: Python (python)Typer also generates a help page for you, which you can see with python3 greet.py --help. Ideas for tools: a password generator, a unit converter, a tool that shows the weather for your city, or a to-do list that stores its items in a JSON file.
Analyze a dataset
Pick a dataset that interests you and try to answer a question with it. Many governments and cities publish open data, and sites like Kaggle have thousands of free datasets. Or use your own data: your bank transactions, your running app’s export, or the playlist history from your music service.
The go-to library is pandas. Polars is a newer and faster alternative that’s quickly gaining popularity. Work in a Jupyter Notebook so you can see your results step by step, and make a few charts to show what you found. If you’ve never used pandas, start with my article on processing Excel data with pandas.
Python tricks and libraries to get more project ideas
If these Python project ideas are not for you, perhaps you can explore some cool Python tricks and libraries instead. Chances are these will inspire you to come up with even cooler Python project ideas:
- Top 15 Python packages you must try
- 30 Python Language Tricks That Will Make You a Better Coder
- Python for data science
That’s it! I hope you liked these Python project ideas. Don’t forget to use and create a venv when you install these packages. If you have anything to add, please do so in the comments. I’d love to hear your ideas. Thanks for reading, and happy coding!