Mini projects are an important starter kit for developers who want to pursue a career in tech.

Interviewers are particularly interested in your mini projects. The computer science mini project topics you work on sheds light on your career interests and speaks for your enthusiasm to learn tech concepts at a deeper level.

Moreover, when you apply your theoretical knowledge in a hands-on way, you get to explore a breadth of concepts related to your topic.

The practical experience gained from tackling technical challenges in your mini project helps you walk away with longer retention of applied skills.

10 Best Mini Projects for CSE

1. Notes & Password manager

Password managing and note-taking are some of the most overlooked virtual activities in today's digital age. Various companies are constantly adding new features to note-taking and password management.

So, instead of having and maintaining two different apps in your system, you will be developing a single app that can perform both of these activities.

Notes & Password Manager is an android application that can be used to take notes anytime and generate strong passwords whenever you need to create new passwords.

First part of the app i.e. the note making app may be mainstream for some of you developers, but the password management part is an interesting way to level up your Android Development skills.

2. Library Management System

Management systems are used in all institutions. It may be digital (software) or analog (record books/ledgers), but everybody surely uses it.

Today data is power.

But having said so this data should also be well-managed for clean and accurate data to exist at all times.

One such system is the Library Management System, which is used to keep a record of books present in a library. This system consists of information regarding Books, where you can perform all the operations that are required in an actual system such as CRUD operation, advanced search, book issuing, and also to store the information (in an encrypted format) within files using the process known as Serialization.

3. Breakout Ball Game

Java is widely used by game development companies and for creating mobile games. And this fact shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given how versatile the language is and given its rich collection of open-source material.

Many of the world’s top mobile games have been developed in Java. Minecraft, Mission Impossible III, and Asphalt 6 are just a few popular names you are probably familiar with.

In Breakout Ball Game, a layer of bricks lines the top third of the screen and the goal is to destroy them all. A ball moves straight around the screen, bouncing off the top and two sides of the screen. When a brick is hit, the ball bounces back and the brick is destroyed. The player loses a turn when the ball touches the bottom of the screen; to prevent this from happening, the player has a horizontally movable paddle to bounce the ball upward, keeping it in play. The player uses the platform to keep the ball running. The goal is to break the bricks without missing the ball with your platform.

4. QuizUp - A Quiz Application

The quiz format for exams has been standard for a long time and still persists to be. The reason for this is -  the efficiency and feasibility it carries with it.

What if you could build one? This project aids you to build a simple Android application where students can take their tests in a quiz format. The application is developed using Java and integrated with Firebase.

Here, Firebase will not only be used for deployment but more importantly the student (examinee) data will be stored, manipulated and the results can be fetched accordingly.

5. Chatbot Song Recommender System

Have you ever wondered if there was a way to capture your mood and play songs according to that? Why not make an application that does just that! And that too without having to learn Natural Language Processing/Deep Learning from scratch.

In this project, you will be building a chatbot that converses with a user, and recommends songs based on the emotional analysis of the conversation using open source tools like the Cakechat chatbot, IBM tone analyzer API, and Last.fm songs API. The benefit of using these APIs is that you don’t have to think of creating and training models from scratch, and can just use them out of the box.

6. YouTube Transcript summarizer

Deep Learning-Natural Language Processing and Web Development are two favorite choices of beginner Python developers.

But what if you could not only learn both of these but also create a project that you can use in your daily life?

In this project, you will be creating a Chrome extension that summarizes a YouTube video from its transcripts. This is done by implementing an NLP model from the popular Huggingface library.

This project is a time-saver for YouTube viewers and a remarkable addition to your dev portfolio. Completing this project will showcase your command over full-stack development using HTML, CSS in the frontend, and Flask for the backend, along with the concepts of NLP.

Don't stop with these skills. Add REST, HTTP, Spring, and more - Download projects

Moreover, you will gain transferable skills in creating a Chrome extension into a web app. This is a valuable skill given the huge popularity and scope of extensions.

7. House Price Prediction

Machine Learning is a field with immense potential and buzz, and thus, most Python beginners feel inclined to start with Machine Learning. And there is no better starting point than this housing price prediction case study.

In fact, the de facto standard starting point in Machine Learning - Andrew NG’s Coursera course, starts with this very example. That, unfortunately, lacks the Python implementation, something that you can compensate for, via this project.

Even though this project in Python is of low complexity, it will expose you to real-world Machine Learning simulation, in a fun way.

You will get hands-on experience with Machine Learning libraries such as SKLearn, Numpy, and more.

In addition, you will get to import and explore a dataset to fit your requirement, preprocess it to remove noise, implement the model using SKLearn, train it on the training dataset, and finally test it on the test dataset.

8. Stock Visualization-Forecasting dashboard using Dash

Inspired by Scam 1992, nearly everyone has a newfound interest in the stock market these days. Knowing how volatile the market is, every trader definitely needs a stock visualizer that can help them make better trading decisions. Even better would be to have a visualizer that can also make forecasts using Machine Learning. And that is exactly what you would be building in this project.

9. Resume Builder Web Application

Any software developer's journey is characterized by long hours trying to create the 'ideal resume', one that is crisp, to the point, correctly formatted, and easily update-able, and many existing resume builder tools that provide these are paid ones.

In this project, you will create your own resume builder application using React and Material UI on the Frontend and Node-Express for the backend.

By working on this project, you will have three advantages:

1. Learn full-stack Javascript development with React-Material-Node-Express, all of which are extremely useful technologies in your journey as a professional software developer.
2. Build your own application that you can use in your daily life.
3. Iteratively build up on the application to provide more features, better UI, and ace those interview questions!

10. Student Result Management System

There are various examination results you hear every now and then such as school exam results, competitive exam results, college semester exam results, and so on. Have you ever thought about how it generates a result by simply entering student information? (Given the massive amount of information present of  millions of students.)

Have you ever considered making one?

You will be wearing a creator hat in this project and building a full stack website that takes student information from a database as input and outputs a PDF of the student's results. The results can also be downloaded and shared.

The three areas to implement in this project include:

1. Result Section for students
2. Database for storage
3. Admin Section for administrative purposes

17 Skills To Gain From The Above Mini Projects

More Innovative project ideas for computer science engineers

If you are not sure where your interest lies or are feeling stuck in coming up with a project idea of your own, you can also take inspiration from these amazing project ideas for computer science engineers, suggested by Crio's dev community.

Bonus resource: Tips and Tricks to highlight projects in your resume

Python project idea

Emotion Based Music Player (credits: Gourav Sardana)

Google Search has set the bar high to immediately receive useful information for things you search on the internet. Today, users automatically expect to get accurate and instant recommendations on almost anything.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a music player that could recommend songs based on the mood of a user?

What to do

Create a desktop GUI application that recommends songs to users based on an emoji or live emotion of the user.

1. Create a basic music player such that users can:
2. Search for particular songs they like.
3. Listen to songs from a wide range of music.
4. Filter songs by genre, artist, etc.
5. Implement functionality to extract emotion from an image a user uploads or clicks a live photo - Refer.
6. Implement functionality to recommend songs based on emotion. Users should be able to receive recommendations based on:
7. An emoji selected, photo uploaded, or a live photo clicked.
8. Their selected genre/artist.

Scope of the project

Concepts: Facial Emotion Recognition, Convolution Neural Networks, Recommendation Systems

Skills: Tkinter, OpenCV

Tech: Anaconda(Python), Keras

Time Investment

70-80 hours

References

• Free and Open Music APIs
• Music emotion recognition
• The ABC of building a content-based music recommender system
• What are some algorithms used in a music recommendation system?
• Using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to build a music recommendation system

Also check out:

For more Python projects, visit Crio Projects Hub

Javascript project idea

Online white board (credits: Nabhan Abdulla)

Online tutoring and schooling from home are becoming very common nowadays. Moreover, because of the COVID pandemic, brainstorming and discussing ideas over video calls have picked up in popularity as well.

In such cases, whiteboards play an important part in making these tasks simple. With a whiteboard, you can easily explain and share ideas. Having a digital whiteboard solves the problem of purchasing and installing a physical one.

What to do

Build an online whiteboard.

1. Implement basic drawing features like pen, shapes, colors, and eraser options.
2. Implement option to redo/undo actions.
3. Implement feature to export the drawing board (as pdf/image).
4. [Miscellaneous] Implement feature to collaboratively work on the same whiteboard using an invite.
5. [Miscellaneous] Create an app using electron.js.
6. Deploy to netlify.

Scope of the project

Concepts: Data Structures and Algorithms, Frontend

Skills: Data Structures (Stack, Queue, Bucket), Jspdf, Jquery, HTML5 Canvas

Tech: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Time investment

20-30 hours

References

• Web Whiteboard
• Doodle with strangers on InterWeb!
• Create a web-based drawing application using Canvas

Also check out:

For more Javascript projects, visit Crio Projects Hub.

Java project idea

Bulk Thumbnail creator

Thumbnail images are often used to represent a larger image or a video. They help developers display more content to users without affecting the website load time. These are also used by video players to give users a snapshot of part of the video where the user wants to seek to.

What to do

Develop a web app to create thumbnails from video/images.

1. Implement feature to create thumbnails for all images in a folder as per:
2. Specified height and width (crop if required).

3. Specified height and width (don’t crop, add a black background to fill).

4. Implement feature to create thumbnails from a video as per:

5. Specified height and width (crop if required).

6. Specific interval (in seconds) between each subsequent thumbnail.

7. Implement multi-threading to improve the performance of the application.

8. Perform thumbnail generation in the background to interact with the application during processing.

9. Handle different tasks like re-sizing, renaming, etc using different threads.

Scope of the project

Concepts:  Image Processing, Multithreading

Skills: JavaCV, Java Threads/Runnable

Tech: SpringBoot, Gradle

Other projects to deepen your understand of Multithreading:

Time investment

40-50 hours

References

• What is a thumbnail?
• Video thumbnail generator
• Thumbnailator - a thumbnail generation library for Java
• Programming GUI - Java
• Image Processing Java

For more Java projects, visit Crio Projects Hub

Android project idea

Deal Finder

Despite the unpredictable nature of the stock market, every investor wants to know how their stocks are performing and which stocks to buy/sell at the right time. They are constantly looking for reliable forecasting platforms to make the best data-driven decisions about their trades.

What to do

Build an Android application that presents users with useful intel on different stocks. Implement features to:

1. Fetch stock data using an API.
2. Add stock portfolios (use a database).
3. Predict the price of selected stocks and calculate the risk of trading these stocks.
4. Visualize information like user’s current stock returns, prospective stocks forecast, competitor analysis, etc.

Scope of the project

Concepts: Android Development, Data Visualization

Skills: API Handling (RestTemplate, Jackson), Time Series Analysis, Google Chart/JFree Chart, Tiingo API

Tech: Android Studio, Android SDK, REST API

Time Investment

40-60 hours

References

• Tiingo API - End-of-Day Prices and Meta Information
• Stock market forecasting using Time Series analysis
• Stock Market Predictor using Supervised Learning
• Python for Android applications
• Google Charts, JFree Chart

For more Android projects, visit Crio Projects Hub.

Web development project idea

Portfolio Website

Portfolio websites are a great way to showcase your skills and talent to a potential employer. Having a portfolio website gives a clear message about how serious you are about getting hired. Moreover, building a website sharpens your web development skills and adds relevant skills to your skillset.

What to do

Create a portfolio website to show off your projects and achievements to prospective employers.

1. Use any frontend framework like Angular/React to develop the portfolio website.
2. Find a template online or try your hand at designing a website.
3. Include links and add demos of your projects.
4. Deploy your website on netlify or Github.
5. [Miscellaneous] Buy a domain and host it on the cloud.
6. [Miscellaneous] Build your own CMS (like WordPress).

Scope of the project

Concepts: Web Development

Skills: Netlify/Github Pages, UI/UX (Figma)

Tech: Angular/React

Time Investment

20-30 hours

References

• Developer Portfolio Examples
  • Mathew Williams
  • Zac Clemans
• Deploying
  • netlify
  • Github Pages
• Hosting a static website on Google Cloud using Google Cloud Storage
• Free Domain via Github Student Developer pack

For more web development projects, visit Crio Projects Hub.

Other software project ideas for CSE

FTP Server

Sharing memories, large files, or even confidential documents, have become an effortless task for people across the world today. But being able to share files from one location to another is not enough. Data protection has become increasingly important with the number of security threats rising over the internet.

What to do

Create an FTP server to backup your files to the cloud and transfer them securely over the internet.

1. Build an FTP Host server.
2. Implement functionality to transfer files via the FTP protocol (use VSFTPD).
3. Add a provision to authenticate users.
4. Implement functionality to securely communicate using SSL protocol - buy an SSL certificate/create a self-signed certificate.
5. Deploy your server on Heroku.
6. Build an FTP Client
7. Create a simple website or GUI application to upload files using FTP protocol.

Blog bonus: Linux commands for secure file transfer and more. Download [free]

Scope of the project

Concepts: File Transfer, Networking, Deployment

Skills: FTP, SSL, Server Side Scripting

Tech: VSFTPD server, Bash Commands, Heroku

Time Investment

20-30 hours

References

• Filezilla FTP Client
• FTP server using VSFTPD
• How To Set Up vsftpd for Ubuntu
• Deploying apps in Heroku

Also, check out these repos for more CSE project ideas

How to choose mini projects

When it comes to selecting a mini project, it is not paramount to select an innovative idea. What you learn out of it is important to showcase your skill set.

More than going after the number of projects, interviewers usually ask questions hoping you would have chosen mini projects that you care about. Having multiple projects in your resume and not being able to give in-depth answers about them throws you in a bad light.

Work on these 5 internship-grade projects and land a job in backend or full-stack - Guaranteed!

As a recommended practice, work towards having 3-5 mini projects in your resume.

Check out some interesting projects you can add to your resume.

Use the following checklist to choose your mini projects:

1. Select mini projects that add value to your career goals.
2. Make sure they are in line with your programming interests.
3. Build or add a feature that solves a real problem.

Some questions to think about when choosing innovative project ideas:

1. What problem is my project solving?
2. Who is it solving for?
3. Why does this problem need to be solved?
4. Are the skills and technologies relevant today/next 5-10 years?

Always keep these points in mind when choosing project ideas for computer engineering.

How to include projects in your resume

It doesn’t stop at just working on multiple mini projects. An important element in getting noticed by leading tech companies is to present your skills in an informative and engaging way.

Also read: Learn how to write appealing work descriptions in your resume

Before adding all projects to your resume, take a moment to structure your information in a concise and consistent manner. Include information that would interest your potential employer.

Blog Bonus: Tips and Tricks to structure your resume + Free Resume Template

When scanning through your resume, in one glance they should understand:

1. What your project is about
2. What you did in the project
3. The skills and technologies you have used in the project
4. Time spent on the project

Later when you are called for an interview, be prepared to answer questions related to:

1. The thought process behind selecting the mini project
2. Technical challenges faced during the mini project
3. How you overcame them
4. Anything you would do differently to improve your project today
5. Key learning outcomes from the mini project

Quick Recap

1. Mini projects are an important starter kit for developers who want to pursue a career in tech.
2. Mini projects are meant to deepen your learning in areas that pique your programming interests.
3. Have a good mix of mini projects that help you learn and implement knowledge in innovative ways.
4. It is recommended to have 3-5 mini projects in your resume.

Work on these internship-grade tech projects to land a job as a software dev - Job guarantee!

1. Usually, the duration of most of the mini projects is around 20-80 hours. So, even if you have missed working on meaningful projects, you can start now.
2. Present the skills and technologies gained from your mini projects in a concise and consistent format in your resume.
3. Include information that would interest your potential employer.
4. Be prepared to answer in-depth questions related to your mini projects.

Don’t miss out

Free List of 20+ Unique Mini Projects to add to your resume.

What you’ll find inside:

Projects in Python, Java, Machine Learning. Learn skills like

1. REST API
2. HTTP
3. Selenium
4. Spring
5. Bot building
6. Jackson
7. Serialization-Deserialization
8. Firebase
9. Android basics
10. Game Development

And more...

Build your favorite projects by following the step-by-step instructions.

Head to Crio Projects Hub and find a project that suits you the best!

Hope you found this blog useful and were able to choose an interesting project to get started with. Do share this with your friends who would love to check out the plethora of CSE mini project ideas suggested in this blog. Also, do let us know in the comments below, which project interested you the most :)