JetBrains Academy’s New Projects and Topics: March Update

Anastasia Khramushina

JetBrains Academy continues to dispel the common misconception that programming is boring. Through our projects, you can create your own music app, build a strategy game, customize a photo editor, and even defend a wizarding school from former students – all while learning how to code.

Check out 6 new projects and 34 educational topics we released last month and share your ideas for projects that would be fun to work on in the comments section below!

Python

🆕 Project: School of Wizards and Magic Wars (Beta). Medium

Several sorcerers have returned to take revenge on the wizarding school that expelled them. The headmaster requires brave, smart students to defend the school. Get ready to help while learning how to build complex SQL queries and data types with SQLite.

🆕 Project: Duskers (Beta). Hard

Create a strategy game inspired by the “Duskers” video game, where a team of robots explores mysterious locations and looks for titanium. Build it yourself, starting from the menu and adding the game hub, some animation, a few upgrade options, and some spooky enemies to spice things up.

🆕 NLP project: Corpus Annotation From Scratch (Beta). Challenging

Any serious NLP experiment requires data processing. In most cases, you use ready-made data, but sometimes you need to compile a corpus yourself. In this project, you’ll build an annotated corpus from scratch, extracting morphological features and certain types of named entities with SpaCy, as well as conduct a statistical data study using the pandas library.

Last month 2 Python projects got high scores for their usefulness, clarity, and fun from our users. Check out Hacker Attack and Nobel Laureates, which have just been released from Beta!

Java

🆕 Project: HyperCollections (Beta). Challenging

In this project, you will develop a small collections framework while learning about the basic principles of standard Java collections. You’ll also get familiar with Google Guava and Apache Common Collections libraries and use them to solve real-world problems related to designing clear and reusable architecture.

🆕 Project: Meal Planner (Beta). Challenging

Create an app that allows users to categorize meals, plan weekly menus, and store shopping lists. In addition to creating a practically useful tool, you’ll also learn about relational databases, SQL, file operations, arrays, and more.

🆕 Topics:

• Collections: Introduction to HashMap
• Spring Boot: RestTemplate, JPA and Hibernate settings

Looking for more challenging topics in Java? Check out the new Advanced Java track, which dives into some rare Java features and libraries that are useful for solving real-world problems.

Kotlin

🆕 Android project: Music Player (Beta). Challenging

In this project, you’ll develop a music player that allows you to add new songs, create playlists, and play music from files. It even has playback.

🆕 Topics:

• Android: Playing audio with MediaPlayer, State management
• Additional instruments: Annotation use-site targets, Logback, Introduction to Kotlin reflection
• Collections: Comparable and comparator
• Ktor: Content negotiation and serialization

What’s more, the File Type Analyzer and Photo Editor projects have been released from Beta.

Frontend

🆕 Topics: 

• JavaScript: Uploading files and images
• Node.js: Introduction to fs module, Introduction to os module, Fs promises, Write to file, What is a package manager?
• HTML: Ordered list and types
• CSS: CSS Cursor, CSS function min(), max(), clamp(), Scroll snapping, Grid property

Fundamentals

🆕 Topics:

• Essentials: TIFF, What is HTTP server?
• Databases and SQL: ​​Row locks
• Unity: Introduction to Unity
• DevOps: Dockerfile (RUN, SHELL)

Additionally, the Remo, Gitman, and Dolly projects have been released from Beta. They are all a part of the beginner-friendly Quick Start With Git track.

Data science

🆕 Topics: 

• Pandas: Working with datetime data in pandas
• Machine learning: Introduction to neural networks, MAPE and sMAPE, MSE and RMSE

Go

🆕 Topic: Introduction to Gin

Additionally, the Cipher Decoder project has been released from Beta.

Mobile

🆕 Topics: Column, row, and box, TextField composable

Scala

🆕 Topic: Scaladoc

That’s it for this month! We hope you’ll find a fun way to gain new programming skills with one (or a few) of these new projects and topics.

Note that projects marked as Beta are still in the early stages of testing. If you’re interested in checking out Beta projects on the platform, make sure the Beta-tester feature is enabled in your profile settings.

If you have any questions or if you would like to share your feedback, feel free to leave a comment below, contact us at academy@jetbrains.com, or share your thoughts with us on Twitter or Facebook.

Enjoy learning!
Your JetBrains Academy team

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