Python is a versatile and beginner-friendly programming language that can be an excellent starting point for middle school students to begin coding. Learning to code at a young age can foster problem-solving skills, logical thinking, and a skill set which would be useful in almost any line of work. With Python's simplicity and collection of libraries, students can work on projects that are both fun and practical. In this blog post, we'll explore 20 Python project ideas that middle school students can tackle to kick-start their coding journey.

1. Recipe Organizer

You can create a program where users can store and organize their favorite recipes. You can add external features as you learn more about the programming language, like allowing a user to add new recipes, categorize them, and search for recipes based on ingredients or categories. The project will involve you building an online diary or database where users can add/update entries of recipes. 

Skills Required: File handling, data organization, user input handling

Drawbacks: Will require updating the code every time you need to add new features

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is suitable for beginners who are just starting out and do not want to get into intense coding. For more details, you can visit this site.

2. Music Player

You will be developing a simple music player application where users can play, pause, and skip songs. As you gain confidence in your coding skills, adding features like creating playlists, shuffling songs, and displaying song metadata is also possible. You will be using Tkinter, which is a Python library for building the graphical user interface (GUI), and the Pygame.mixer module for loading and playing sounds.

Skills Required: File handling, audio playback, user interface design.

Drawbacks: Will require updating the code every time you need to add new features

Level of coding skills Required: Intermediate

This project is suitable for beginners and those with an interest in exploring the various modules of Python. It is also good for someone who is just starting out and wants to avoid getting into intense coding. For more details, you can visit this site.

3. Story Generator

Using Python, it’s possible to create a program that generates random story outlines or writing prompts for you to enhance and have a go at writing a story yourself! Again, you will start with a basic program and you can update it as you learn to specify parameters such as genre, setting, and characters.

You will need to define phrases or elements of the story. For example, when the story takes place, the location/where, and who are the characters. The random.choice() function comes pre-installed with Python, hence, once the elements are defined, using this function you will generate a random story. 

Skills Required: File handling, random text generation, user input handling.

Drawbacks: For developing complex and longer stories, you will need to do a lot of prep work to define the parameters and elements of the story.

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is suitable for beginners and those with an interest in exploring the random.choice module of Python. It is also good for someone who is just starting out and wants to avoid getting into intense coding. For more details, you can visit this site. 

4. Memory Game

The memory game of flipping tiles is very popular among people of all ages. It is not only free-to-play but also a fun way to improve your knowledge, depending on what information you put into the tiles. You can create a memory-matching game where players flip cards or tiles to find matching pairs. Initially, you will build the game to have the solution as matching identical tiles. As you gain more experience, you can customize it to match words from say Spanish to their English translation.

You will need to build a robust GUI, as that will form the basis of the gameplay. For that, some knowledge of the pygame module is necessary. Also, you will need to be aware of some other basic Python functions.

Skills Required: Graphics libraries, user interface design, game logic.

Drawbacks: Depending on the database used, you might see a limited number of tiles. 

Level of coding skills Required: Intermediate

This project is suitable for those with an interest in exploring the Pygame module of Python, and who also have a command of the programming language. It is also good for someone interested in games. For more details, you can visit this site.

5. Drawing App

MS Paint is one of the most widely known and used apps on PCs. You might’ve been familiar with the app and spent hours experimenting with all of its features. Well, using Python, it is possible to create a simple drawing app that will allow you to create art using the mouse and cursor on a plain canvas. 

You can use Kivy, which is a platform-independent GUI tool in Python for this project. As you get familiar with its features, you can add widgets to the app, and keep in mind that you will need to add a feature to save the files to make the app practical. 

Skills Required: Graphics libraries, user input handling, file handling, user interface design.

Drawbacks: The most basic coding will not make the files saveable. You might need some help from experienced coders to add functionalities to the app

Level of coding skills Required: Intermediate

This project is suitable for those with an interest in exploring the Kivy module of Python, and who also have a command of the programming language. It is also good for someone interested in arts. For more details, you can visit this site. 

6. Weather App

You can build a program that will collect weather data from an API (Application Programming Interface) and display it to the user. Include features like current weather conditions, forecasts, and location-based weather updates. This is a simple project that makes use of the Python interface Tkinter, which will help build the GUI, and also use the Requests module, which will help in web scraping to collect weather data from a website. 

Skills Required: API usage, data visualization, user interface design.

Drawbacks: None as such

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is suitable for those with an interest in exploring the Tkinter interface of Python. It is also good for someone interested in web scraping, which is one of the most basic applications of Python. For more details, you can visit this site. 

7. Trivia Quiz Game

Quizzing is one of the classical ways students have enjoyed learning facts over the ages. If you are someone who enjoys quizzing and is always eager to test your knowledge across different quizzes, you might want to build your own quiz game using Python. You can use a few lines of code to create a dataset of questions and answers, which can be edited using any text editor. Depending on your expertise, you can add questions. As you learn, you can add options like hints and prompts when the wrong answer is given. 

Skills Required: Data structures, user input handling, game logic.

Drawbacks: Every new question and its answers will need to be added back into the main code

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding. For more details, you can visit this site. 

8. Virtual Pet Simulator

Talking Tom remains one of the most popular apps among children. The concept of the app was simple: put in an interactive cat, ‘Tom’ and allow it to respond as per the users’ actions on the touch screen. While building such a high-quality app is something that requires complex coding and algorithms, you can build a simple pet simulator using Python. In this project, you will use some basic Python code to build a basic UI with buttons and text boxes and also make use of CRUD (CREATE, READ, UPDATE, and DELETE) operations. 

Skills Required: Object-oriented programming, user interaction, game mechanics.

Drawbacks: There will be a 2D interface for the app with limited interactions.

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding. For more details, you can visit this site. 

9. Budget/Expense Tracker

In our day-to-day life, most of the expenses are digital and most of our transactions, like ordering something online or booking a cab, is done via our phones. Tracking these expenses in one app makes managing our money easier and helps create a monthly budget. While most of the expense trackers are very advanced, you can build an expense tracker using Python.  

Tkinter will help with the GUI while using Tkcalendar will allow for the inclusion of a drop-down calendar. You will also need to use SQLite, where you will store all your data and finally, you will need a Datetime module to allow for daily expense tracking. 

Skills Required: Data manipulation, user input handling, data visualization, familiarity with SQL.

Drawbacks: Your SQL database needs to be foolproof or else you will get faulty expenses

Level of coding skills Required: Intermediate

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding and also for someone familiar with SQL. For more details, you can visit this site. 

10. Simple Calculator

You will create a basic calculator to define and perform functions for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division operations. The goal is to implement a user interface for accepting inputs and displaying results, including error handling, to manage invalid inputs and division by zero cases.

Skills Required: Basic arithmetic operations, user input handling.

Drawbacks: Limited functionality.

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is suitable for beginners and those with an interest in exploring the random.choice module of Python. It is also good for someone who is just starting out and wants to avoid getting into intense coding. For more details, you can visit this site. 

11. Number Guessing Game

You will utilize Python, so the computer generates a random number within a specified range for players to guess. You must implement a loop structure to allow multiple guesses and include logic to provide feedback on the correctness of the guess and handle non-numeric inputs.

Skills Required: Random number generation, conditional statements, loops.

Drawbacks: May become repetitive.

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is suitable for beginners and those with an interest in exploring the random.choice() module of Python. It is also good for someone who is just starting out and wants to avoid getting into intense coding. For more details, you can visit this site. 

12. Simple Chatbot

If you have visited any website recently, especially one that deals with consumer-centric products or solutions, you must have come across the brand’s chatbot, which is usually located at the bottom right corner of the screen. It can be activated by simply hovering your cursor over it. 

Now, building a chatbot that interacts with users is not that complicated and Python is a convenient tool to build the same. In general, there are two kinds of chatbots, Rule-based and Self-learning. You can use Python’s Tkinter module for building a simple GUI and use the NLTK (Natural language toolkit) library to train the chatbot and build a model at the end of your project. 

Skills Required: String manipulation, conditional statements, a solid understanding of Python, Keras, and natural language processing (NLP).

Drawbacks: Biases or errors in the dataset used for training the chatbot will lead to incorrect responses to queries.

Level of coding skills Required: Intermediate

This project is suitable for those interested in natural language processing, but coding and dealing with various libraries in Python can be a bit challenging. For more details, you can visit this site. 

13. Simple Alarm Clock

This project is pretty self-explanatory. You will use the various features of Python to build a simple alarm clock that will send reminders to your screen at a specified time. DateTime and Tkinter libraries will provide you with an interface to set the alarm according to the demand in a 24-hour format. You will need to have Pycharm IDE installed on your computer for this project.

Skills Required: Time manipulation, loops.

Drawbacks: None as such

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding. For more details, you can visit this site. 

14. Password Generator

Have you ever experienced being signed out of an app and, when you try to sign in again, you find yourself scratching your head but are unable to remember the password? Do not fret, as it happens to the best of us. While there are facilities to store all of your passwords secured with an online master key service, you can explore a password generator project using Python. 

This project will help you explore the string module, which will help in accessing string constants, like string.ascii_letters, string.digits and string.punctuation, which are required to add alphabets, numbers, and symbols in the password.

Finally, the random.choice() module will be required to create a random password, which fits the predetermined criteria. 

Skills Required: Random number generation, strings, Python modules

Drawbacks: Passwords might become repetitive after some time. 

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is a good idea for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding. For more details, you can visit this site.

15. File Encryption/Decryption Tool

It might be surprising to find out what information you can find out about yourself online. One way to limit the data you're giving out on the web is to use an encryption service to make everything you share password-protected. While the technology to seamlessly encrypt everything on your computer is a bit complicated, it is possible to build a file encryptor/decryptor using Python. 

You will use the cryptography package of Python and, more specifically, the Fernet module, which encrypts any file you have provided as input. Then you will need to generate a key, which will be required to decrypt the file as and when required. You must keep this key in a safe place. 

Skills Required: File handling, string manipulation, and some knowledge of cryptography.

Drawbacks: This is a simple encryptor/decryptor and works only on select files.

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding and for someone interested in cryptography. For more details, you can visit this site. 

16. Currency Converter

When traveling to different countries, the currency exchange rate is always a concern. If you’re interested in exploring foreign exchange (or forex) rates across the world or want to know what the US Dollar (USD) is worth against foreign currencies, you might want to try your luck in building a currency converter using Python!

You will need an API key to begin this project, which you can access here. You will need the requests module for accessing data from the Forex website, which needs to be installed separately. Finally, using the Tkinter module, you can build a GUI, and forex_python libraries will help you build the dataset for currencies across the globe. 

Skills Required: Mathematical formulas, user input handling, and some knowledge of forex.

Drawbacks: Forex rates are highly dynamic and if some data is missing, it can lead to erroneous results

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding and for someone interested in how currencies work. For more details, you can visit this site. 

17. Hangman Game

Python is a very good language to build basic games with, and building a Hangman game is one of the classic projects you can try. You will need to install the random module and one of the key learnings from this project will be string manipulation. The game will allow for multiplayer support, where each player gets a turn to provide his/her guess as input.

Skills Required: File handling, string manipulation, loops.

Drawbacks: This is a simple encryptor/decryptor and works only on select files.

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding and for someone interested in building text-based games. For more details, you can visit this site. 

18. BMI Calculator

Body Mass Index (BMI) is one of the most widely used data points to provide a general idea about the health of an individual. It tells you the percentage of fat in a person’s body and helps categorize people as either underweight, healthy, or overweight. This project requires simple coding and use of input() and float() functions, and the if-elif-else condition for the classification of people into predefined categories. 

Skills Required: File handling, mathematical formulas, user input handling.

Drawbacks: None as such

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding and functions. For more details, you can visit this site. 

19. Palindrome Checker

A palindrome is a sequence of characters, not necessarily text, which, when reversed, would result in the same sequence of characters. They are fun to look at and fascinating in nature. While visual inspection can find some of the text-based palindromes out when given a lengthy sample, it is better to have a checker in handy. Well, using a few lines of code, you can create a palindrome checker in Python. This project will make use of the string() function. 

Skills Required: String.

Drawbacks: None as such

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding and functions. For more details, you can visit this site. 

20. Web Scraper

Web scraping is the process of gathering information from a particular website. While you can check out every section of a website online and find the data yourself, automating this task not only helps save time but also aids in filtering out unnecessary data. Python has a package called Beautiful Soup, which is an excellent tool for web scraping and using its various functions. You can customize all the details, you would like to include/exclude in your final results. 

Skills Required: File handling, Web scraping libraries, HTML basics.

Drawbacks: Websites keep updating from time to time and the code will need to be updated regularly. Some websites prohibit web-scraping

Level of coding skills Required: Beginner

This project is good for students interested in exploring some basic Python coding and functions. The applications of web-scraping, including building price prediction projects across various industries. For more details, you can visit this site. 

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Founded by Harvard graduate students, Veritas AI gives you the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of computer science and AI. You get a chance to work 1-1 with mentors from universities like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and more to write research papers or build unique projects. Last year, we had over 1000 students apply to do AI work with us, and our alums went on to study computer science and AI at top universities. You can find the application form here.