After learning the basics of how to code, the recommendation is that you get cracking with actual coding. ‘The easiest way to get better at programming for beginners is to program,’ says Aishwariya Ramachandran, a Software Developer at Oracle, on Quora. You’ve got to start making something real, but what? The best projects push the boundaries of what you know, resulting in being a kind of crash coding course itself. Here we list the top five programming projects for new coders.
1. Dice Rolling Simulator
This is a great mini project for the Python beginner from KnightLab, part of Northwestern University’s community of designers, developers, students and educators.
Goal: You want to write a program that simulates rolling dice. When the program is up and running, it randomly chooses a number between 1 and 6 (or whatever integers you prefer). The program should both print the number and then enquire whether you’d like to roll again. You’ll need to set the minimum and maximum number produced. Therefore, the program should be able to randomly grab a number between that range.
If you already have programming experience, concepts used in this project should be familiar to you. Print, for example, is similar to JavaScript’s console.log.
If you get stuck, here’s a YouTube video to help you out. Good luck!
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Create A To-Do List
This is definitely one of the top five programming projects for new coders, because you get to extend yourself using three popular programming languages: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Goal: Build a to-do list app using a simple UI or user interface. You’ll include buttons, animation, user interaction and events. Afterwards, integrate your to-do list into your website.
If you want some more detail on the project and also how to do it, check out this YouTube video. The Code repository can be found here: https://github.com/themaxsandelin/todo, and here’s a link to the design files: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yq0qm8xtfg.
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Develop a Weight-Conversion Tool
Here you’ll get experience with Bootstrap, a framework for the design and layout of content on a page. It’s an open source toolkit for developing with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. (Watch this beginner tutorial on Bootstrap.)
Goal: Design a simple weight-conversion app using JavaScript and Bootstrap for the UI. Your app should be able to convert pounds to grams and kilograms to ounces. With projects like this, you can include as much or as little functionality as you like.
And if you’re stuck, have a look at this YouTube video on how to carry out this project.
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Make a Social Networking Site
The fourth of our top five programming projects for new coders is creating a data-driven web application, like a social networking site.
Goal: The social networking site you create will need a database to contain profiles, a script to generate profile pages, and some capacity for user interaction. Here’s a book to help you out: Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS, which demonstrates how to make a social networking site with PHP.
Here’s a YouTube video to help you, if you get stuck.
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Web Scraping with Python
Web scraping (also known as ‘web harvesting’ or ‘web data extraction’) is a form of copying, in which specific data is gathered and copied from multiple websites.
Goal: Python is a great programming language for automating boring tasks. Here you’ll use Python, plus a Python library called Beautiful Soup, to extract data from HTML and XML documents. You can even export the data you’ve scraped into a .CSV file, so that you can use Excel to make graphs, charts, etc. This project is also suited to a newbie who has no experience with Python.
Watch this YouTube video for more details on how to do this project.
This article has outlined the top five programming projects for new coders. Pick one and get cracking. If you want to brush up on your coding skills before starting, consider signing up for an online coding bootcamp in Full Stack Web Development, Mobile Development or Software Engineering. You’ll get your own personalised mentor to help you whenever you get stuck.
