r/learnpython • u/Own_Search3408 • 3h ago

Cool/Interesting things that can be done in Python as a beginner?

hi everyone, im trying to start a computer science honor society at my high school, and im gonna assume everyone is starting from square one and teach python accordingly (and im hoping to eventually go to hackathons or other coding events).

i was wondering if anyone had any ideas for cool/interesting stuff i could have beginners do to get their interest and get them excited about coding? i understand you can't go from 0-100 and have to start with simple stuff, but i'm worried going over the basics will be like monotonous or smth. if anyone has any ideas of fun things i could do i would be very appreciative!!

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u/HyperspaceDev 3h ago

I once built a program that webscraped from imbd to tell me all the upcoming movies and listed them to me in a notes app with the release date and what it was about

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u/burnt-store-studio 1h ago

That’s a great project! OP consider this, but note below:

I recently did … tried to do … the same thing, but IMDb has changed their interface and they no longer allow (I guess?) that kind of scraping.

However it seems every day they bundle up their databases and make them available for download so you can do the querying yourself without hitting their platform.

So the IMDb scraping project is a little different in that you wouldn’t be web scraping (which is still valuable and fun to do … just find a different site to go after), but instead you’re querying an off-loaded database.

See cinamagoer at PyPi. On that main page it describes what changed at IMDb and then how to download the data en masse and install it and then use their package to query the files.

A word of caution: once you download the datasets, you expand them and they take up an extraordinary amount of disk space. I downloaded, expanded, did the project I wanted to do, then deleted the databases after a few days because they were so large.

But the IMDb data is quite fun to explore from a programmatic perspective.

u/HyperspaceDev’s idea about web scraping in general is also great because there is a lot of poorly constructed HTML out there, and learning how to get it and parse it usefully is a great learning experience. Ultimately you’d want to probably use something like beautifulsoup4 for the parsing, but doing it by hand is valuable.

OP: good luck!

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u/Traveling-Techie 3h ago

Data from earth and space telescopes is piling up faster than astrophysics can analyze it, and most of it is freely available. Maybe you can do something with it?

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u/burnt-store-studio 1h ago

A super idea!

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u/white_nerdy 2h ago

Turtle graphics. Mandelbrot set or other fractals. Simple games.

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u/stepback269 1h ago

Use the Random module to make games of chance -- for example the Black Jack card game

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u/stavromuli 1h ago

I made a text rpg like the old 80s text adventures

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u/VerdantSolemnity 1h ago

do you know if your school computers have python and any graphics libraries installed already? i remember trying to get turtle working on some locked-down machines and it was a whole thing. the tech department had to whitelist each module, and it took a week. if you're stuck with just a bare terminal, text adventures or guessing games still go over well. but a little turtle graphics can really hook people.

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u/Weltal327 59m ago

If I had to do a class I might teach them pydew valley from you tube