What are some fun projects for non-CS majors?

Question

I'm teaching an undergrad Intro to Programming for Non-majors this semester (in Python) and I'm looking for some fun projects for my students that are engaging but not too difficult for them. This is my first go around with this course.

I've looked at their majors to see if I could come up with projects that might relate to it, but that didn't spark any ideas.

Maybe some games, like Tic-Tac-Toe? Does anyone have suggestions that have worked well for them?

Update: These are typical undergrad students at a US university, so about 18 - 22 year olds, with no programming background. The main focus is on imperative rather than OOP. In the past I haven't found an easy way to introduce graphics with Python or GUIs, but perhaps there's some nice stuff out there now. I don't think Turtle graphics would hold their attention very much or very long, also seems more age appropriate to younger students I believe.

Answer 1

Another fun game is "Spelling Bee" from the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee). You supply a file containing words. The student program reads the file and selects words that match the rules. The milestones are from a past project from Reed College.

1. Print all the words that can be spelled using a fixed string (e.g. "AZDIRWY"). The first letter is the required letter.
2. Prompt the user for a string and print a list of words or take the string as a command line parameter.
3. Generate a score for each word and the total score.
4. Generate the graphics to draw the string as it appears in the paper (six hexagons containing optional letters surrounding a central hexagon with the required letter), along with the list of words.

You could potentially go a slightly different direction and let the python program generate HTML output and view the results in a browser. This illustrates dynamically generated HTML.

Another variation would be to preprocess a "dictionary", removing all words that are too short or contain more that seven distinct characters. Then create multiple files, one for each possible beginning letter. You now have cut down the search space. You might also have the students sort the answers, perhaps by word score.

Answer 2

Here is a concept but it works much better with visual feedback.

Simulate a Pandemic.

A pandemic requires a world with inhabitants that can be in one of several states, such as healthy, sick, dead. The pandemic spreads from sick inhabitants to "neighbor" inhabitants who are healthy. "Dead zones" stop the spread. You can also erect barriers to the spread to simulate oceans and such. People can get well or not and be reinfected or not. The pandemic can "jump" to simulate air travel and such.

Such a thing can be highly parameterized for infection rates and everything else.

A two dimensional array can represent the world and you can "attach" the edges in various ways to simulate a sphere or torus or möbius strip.

The simulation runs through iterations.

If you want to think of the whole thing as MVC, what I've described is the Model part, which normally is independent of the Views and Controllers in any case.

The idea is stolen from a book, Polymorphism Companion, but there is enough above to build it.

Answer 3

As a non-CS adult, when I'm learning a new language I like to write programs to solve some of the Project Euler problems. Stick to the lower numbered problems and they're not too hard for non-mathematicians.

For me, these problems are fun. There is enough information given in the problems to make sure that non-mathematicians understand the goal.

Good Luck!

Answer 4

For the imperative decision making aspects, one of the best approaches I have personally found for getting people interested is to have them write programs that play a game (not writing the game itself, but writing a program that can stand in for a human playing the game).

This challenges them to think analytically about how the game is played, and that analytical thinking is one of the single most important things to learn to be good at programming.

The card game twenty-one (blackjack/pontoon/vingt-un) is an example of an easy starting point, because:

• The rules are very simple, easily explained in about five minutes even to someone who has never heard of the game before.
• The resultant programs tend to be very compact and run very fast (meaning you can run each student’s program hundreds of thousands of times to get a good idea of how it performs). It’s actually possible to write a basic AI for twenty-one in only a few dozen lines of code.
• A simple but near optimal strategy comes intuitively to most people (namely, keep taking new cards until you are at or above a specific value (most people tend to prefer somewhere around 18) and then pass).
• A truly optimal strategy requires actually evaluating what the other players have and figuring out the probability of taking a new card putting you over 21 based on that.

From there, you can branch out into other simple games. Card games tend to work very well for this because they force the students to account for basic probability to have their program do well, but also generally require more than just probability for an optimal strategy.

With a bit of extra prep-work, you can even set this up as a ‘tournament’ type thing (ideally not affecting grades, because that gives a bit of an unfair advantage to those who have the skills to figure out a truly optimal strategy) as a way to encourage those in the class who enjoy competition.

Answer 5

Python turtle

Related to what their major is if you can find something relevant else import turtle # this module allows some visual output, that can be interesting, and gives good feedback.

Jupiter notebooks / google colab notebook.

It allows you to create pages using markdown (same as this site), and to incorporate python code, tables, and charts. Tables can be input or output, charts are output, there are other inputs such as sliders. This is good for any one with a scientific interest, as they can continue using it in their major.

Linguistic analysis / text generation

Write a program to create writing in the style of. You can do this with a 2 stage markov chain (a what?). You just generate a table containing the probability of the next word. e.g. for the short phrase "the cat sat on the mat", both "cat" and "mat" have a 0.5 probability of following a "the". With a long enough training text, you can get it to generate its own texts.

You will have to write the program for them, or at least partly. What you write must work, but not be complete, so that they can add to it. But now I am digressing onto an answer for another question.

Answer 6

At my institution, we (often) take our courses' final products in a different direction: free choice, working as a pair (or in a trio).

Students write 2 to 3 ideas ("proposals") within a google doc, and then talk among themselves to find projects that seem like a good fit.

They then write up short proposals, and divide tasks into "must-have for a minimum viable product", "important", and "nice-to-have". We added this step after years of watching some subset of students get completely lost in the weeds. We came to call them the "font color" students, and we found that having that list upfront enables us to point back to it and redirect the students towards the most important parts of the project.

They have a few weeks to work when the teachers walk around the room offering support, and then they give a final presentation.

The final product is not a huge portion of the grade, because a fair number of the projects don't quite come together. We consider that developmentally appropriate; students are very poor at gauging how much they can get done in 2 weeks and how long things will take. Free projects also force students to explore new avenues, and we did not want to penalize such explorations, as learning how to wrap your brain around new libraries and new challenges is both hard and virally important.

Instead, the students give a presentation on what they wanted to produce and what libraries they used, and then they demo what they have and reflect on what went well and what could have gone better. Personally, I also add in a requirement that students show us one interesting thing in their code, though my colleagues do not do this. In any case, the presentations are a lot of fun, and some number of the projects are always very impressive. It's a fun way to end a course on a nice, uplifting note.

Answer 7

Web scraping is a vast domain that might interest students. Python is great for string matching (the power of regular expressions!), for parsing HTML (or XML or JSON) into structures that are so much more simple to manipulate.

There are even sites that provide APIs to help. The Python Praw library allows you to wander down Reddit pages your students may already be reading, using just a few lines of code.

There are RSS parsers to be constantly in the know, with many site providing RSS feeds.

From there, you can progress to selenium to show how bots click buttons for you, and can warp reality into the fake world we see, with so little effort.

Answer 8

It is not said for how much time the students shall dedicate to their projects, e.g., as an exercise / lab class, or for a (perhaps multiple) week long one. If aiming for shorter ones, I recommend to find inspiration from the sources teaching «this is the problem x, along which we develop technique y». Seek-out for projects which may simplify the day-to-day work for the attendees. Sources of inspiration then could be

• Al Sweigart's Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (note, this is only part of a series); e.g. let Python read / write .csv, spreadsheet, word, or .pdf files; crawl web sites; initiate use of regexes

• Ken Youens-Clark's Tiny Python Projects (one of his playlists). Initially based on a course for attendees from biosciences, the theme in the background is how to formalize writing scripts (his new.py) once and for all, and to include automated quality control (Makefile and pytest)

• examples of advanced tutorials on youtube, e.g., user sentdex' Python Programming for Finance, or Derek Bana's Master Statistics with Python

The listing above can't be exhaustive.

Answer 9

Sound is another subject that can be as simple or complex as you like. The format of a wav file is already pretty complex. You can read the header in Python, and then decode the pcm data stream and, for example, write a new file with half the volume. It should be easy to verify by ear if your program got it right! By only reading and writing files the tricky business of handling audio hardware can be avoided.

Even with this simple format, there are lots of things to try, like detecting and removing silence, or almost silence; converting stereo to mono; re-sampling at a lower rate; generating a sine wave tone at 440hz; superimposing tones; fading two files into one; calculating the average volume every 10 seconds and drawing the envelope shape down the terminal like a cash till printer; drawing a VU meter on the terminal using carriage-return to go back to the start of the line. Perhaps you can find out how shazzam identifies music?

I see there is now a Python wave library to simplify things once the basics have been understood. There is also a pyaudio library to play and record streams, and I see examples using matplotlib for the graphics, which is going a bit far. For non-dynamic output, the SVG format could be interesting, as it is directly viewable in a browser, and there are some Python libraries for it.

Answer 10

I teach first/second semester students C, and what I usually do is start with rather simple tasks like finding out whether a year is a leap year, a wordcount (wc) or ls program etc.

Later I progress to "projects". Most of thess---this is C after all---are simply taken from UNIX console utilities:

• nc: Connect to TCP/UDP/UNIX sockets or listen on them
• tar: Archive (not compress!) files. This is actually surprisingly easy! Bonus benefit that their archive files can be decompressed by other tar Programs!
• PCM picture manipulation: PCM is a simple text based picture format. They can build programs to manipulate saturation or invert colors and then display them in an image viewer
• interactive PCM picture manipulation: The previous can be expanded, with SDL in our case, to also draw a simple GUI.
• snake: Either with SDL or curses/termbox

In my experience, all can be implemented after roughly a week. The specific project to choose is up to themselves, they can also implement their own ideas after speaking with us.

Answer 11

Other cool game with simple logic to it would be Conway's game of life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Answer 12

I know for me, personally, when I'm learning a new language, what helps me most is to have a means of collecting simple user input through a console. (Text or numbers, that's all) What this allows me to do is make simple "games" that don't focus a lot on graphics/presentation/game design, but rather execution. It allows me to focus on figuring out how I can use the least code possible, how I can organize data in the best ways, how to disassemble the user's input into something that my program can read/respond to, etc, etc.

I recently learned Java, and mid way through learning I challenged myself to make an infinite math game. This was a game that would procedurally generate very simple math problems, solve them, present them to the player, and then compare the player's input to the solved problem. If they matched, I add to the player's score and allow them to move on, if they don't match, I end the game and present the player with their score. (And also reveal the correct answer)

Then, once I was more advanced in Java, I challenged myself to make an infinite word game. Which was more challenging, but in all different ways. It kept it very interesting. The math game was hard to make because I had to think up a way to put together numbers + operators into a string, while also keeping them as something that Java could evaluate into an answer, however the word game was hard because I had to find a way to store many many words and pick from them randomly. Additionally, I challenged myself to allow the player to use "hints" to reveal a single letter of the word, and every time they used one it would reveal the next letter, in order. I also added categories and organized the words that way to add additional challenge for myself.

I'm not sure these games exactly would be a good fit for you or your students (and I don't expect that they will be) but hopefully something along these lines could be very fun for them and challenge them in all the right ways. Hope this helps.

Answer 13

MicroPython

I'd like to suggest that you look at MicroPython, not because it is a subset of Python, but because it runs on a growing number of microcontrollers, and there are many complete educational projects built on them.

For example, for about $9 you can get the m5atom which is a read-to-use device that you can plug in to usb, where it appears as a serial port. You download a Python source file to it, and your code can draw on the led display, detect button presses, send infra-red codes, detect movement, listen to Bluetooth, use Wi-fi.

There are many other manufacturers providing similar devices and environments, such as the new Raspberry Pi Pico and the BBC micro:bit, and Adafruit (they call their version CircuitPython), for the same or even lower prices, though you don't need to buy a device per person.

No need for an IDE (though I believe there are some). A simple command line program lets you talk to the python interpreter directly, or use it to download a Python file. Or some manufacturers provide an in-the-browser IDE (example) that can simulate and/or download the resulting source into the device over usb.

There is something very rewarding about seeing something physically tangible happen when you run your code.

Answer 14

Make a Snake (Python) game

My very first class in collage (CS) was to make a snake game. We got some code (like input control and rendering) and just had to connect the pieces and do some simple coding. This class was basically to get everybody comfortable with using the IDE and coding.

The good thing was that those of us that found it very easy could add improvements to the game like sound and better graphics. And the teacher could concentrate on helping those that needed basic help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)

Answer 15

Design a Vending Machine

A straight forward project that I've seen used and worked through myself is to implement a vending machine. Pretty much everyone knows how a vending machine works, so there isn't a learning curve on what the requirements are.

It can be really simple, using a command line interface to enter money, select an option, and get change back.

You could add basic inventory management, keeping track of how many of each item are available - even storing the current inventory in a file, giving the need to work with persisting data in a variety of file formats (simple text file, JSON/YAML)

After the command line version is working, they can learn to create a GUI to represent the vending machine, using the same underlying code. This can help to discover the need to separate business logic from representation.

Answer 16

Sudoku game/solver can be a fun project. I did this in my C/C++ class but should be good for Python as well. At the same time I did a Rust version so those that might be interested could compare them ;)

Answer 17

For simple, but interesting, problems and guidance on language use consider Downey's "Think Python" (Green Tea Press, 2nd edition). Make sure to pick the second edition (Python 3), the first one is Python 2 only. The full source to the book, exercises, and other material is available for free.