JetBrains Academy’s New Projects and Topics: April Update
At JetBrains Academy, we believe that learning can be both educational and entertaining. Our latest projects let you build your own traffic light, create a hospital appointment booking system, and even a password hacker project – not coincidentally combining learning and fun.
This month we’ve released 10 new projects and 36 topics across a variety of programming areas, including Java, Python, Flask, frontend, and data science. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new in our project repository.
Java
🆕 Project: Traffic Light (Beta). Medium
Do you know how traffic lights work? In this project, you’ll have the opportunity to create a simplified version of your own traffic light and learn a variety of new skills in the process. By the end of the project, you’ll be able to work with multithreading, handle exceptions, inherit classes, and use the circular queue data structure.
🆕 Project: Hospital Appointment Booking System (Beta). Hard
In this project, you’ll learn how to build REST services with Spring Boot and work with databases, JSON, and REST API basics. Using your newfound skills, you’ll develop an appointment system based on a REST API that will improve the management of hospitals. Patients can easily schedule appointments, the head physician can monitor doctors’ workloads, and doctors can better plan their days.
🆕 Project: Password Hacker (Beta). Challenging
Get ready to enter the world of hacking with our Java project! As a hacker, your mission is to connect to a secret server without knowing the password. Through this project, you’ll learn about the key tools and techniques used in hacking, including iterators, generators, and the itertools module in Java. You’ll also develop a client app and connect to a server using the socket module, all while gaining a deeper understanding of JSON and the time module.
Additionally, the Meal Planner project has been released from Beta.
🆕 Topics:
- Code organization: Thread-safe singleton
- Spring Boot: Custom queries with @Query, Testing repositories
Python
🆕 Project: Jeopardy! Question Answering Bot (Beta). Challenging
Challenge yourself with our Jeopardy!-style question-answering project, where you’ll create a bot that can answer questions from various fields of knowledge. Can you outdo IBM Watson, which famously beat humans at this game in 2011? Learn how to use sentence-embedding algorithms to separate user questions, and gain insights into preparing a corpus for creating a Q&A system.
🆕 Project: Marathon Runners (Beta). Hard
Get introduced to machine learning by implementing one of the most popular algorithms – the k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm. In this project, you’ll use basic Python tools to code the KNN algorithm from scratch and solve classification problems. You’ll learn about basic data types, practice using Python functions, and get an introduction to object-oriented programming. Additionally, you’ll learn how to prepare and normalize data before feeding it into a machine learning algorithm.
🆕 Project: Learning Progress Tracker (Beta). Hard
Build an education platform to manage registrations, track learning progress, and provide detailed information for users and categories. You’ll practice using loops, flow controls, functional decomposition, and SOLID principles. Learn how to process strings and leverage the unittest framework to ensure error-free code. Suitable collections such as lists will be used to sort and filter data.
Furthermore, we’ve released the projects Simple Text Summarization, Sorting Tool, and Video Game Database from Beta, with improved features and functionality for learners.
Flask
🆕 Project: Movie Database API (Beta). Challenging
Movie buffs will love this new project. Using a movie database, you’ll learn how to use SQLAlchemy to design and implement database table mappings, insert and retrieve data, and filter data by building SQL queries. You’ll also gain valuable experience in implementing data models and relations in a database schema. Grab some popcorn and let’s get started!
Additionally, the Memorization Tool has been released from Beta.
Frontend
🆕 Project: URL Shortener (Beta) Medium.
In this project, you will create a web page to shorten website URLs using HTML and JavaScript. You will also practice manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM) to take input from the user and display the results dynamically. This is a great opportunity to apply your HTML and JavaScript skills in a practical setting and gain hands-on experience with web development.
🆕 Project: Dog Glossary (Beta). Hard
Who doesn’t love seeing cute dog pictures online? Create your web page to display random dog pictures and a list of dog breeds using a public API. This project will help you practice handling APIs and improve your HTML and JavaScript skills. Through fetching data from an API and displaying it on the web page, you’ll learn how to work with promises and handle different data structures.
🆕 Topics:
- CSS: Grid gaps, Introduction to Grid
- JavaScript: Local Storage
- Node.js: Working with filesystem, Creation of HTTP server, Querystring module, What is module?
Data science
🆕 Machine learning project: Naive Bayes Classifier with Pen and Paper (Beta). Easy
In this project, you’ll gain insight into the process of converting words into numerical data and discover the inner workings of the Naive Bayes classifier. Through working on a simple dataset, you’ll develop familiarity with solving classification problems. You’ll also learn about language identification – a crucial task in natural language processing – and discover how to create a basic classifier with only a pen and paper.
Additionally, the projects Generating Randomness and Linear Regression from Scratch are now out of Beta.
🆕 Topics:
- Tools: K-Means in sklearn
- Machine learning: Basics of neural network architecture, MAE, Introduction to Question Answering
- NLP: Knowledge-based QA, Machine Reading Comprehension & Logical Reasoning QA, Open-domain and close-domain QA
This month we have also released a new Game Development with Unity track and updated Introduction to Natural Language Processing. Check them out if you missed them.
Kotlin
The Contacts project has been released from Beta.
🆕 Topics:
- Ktor: WebSockets
- Control flow: Inline functions and reified types in Kotlin
- Object-oriented programming: Infix functions, Operator overloading
- Types and data structures: CharSequence, Type cast and smart cast
Bash (Unix shell)
The Enigma project is now out of Beta.
Android
🆕 Topic: Parcel and Bundle
Fundamentals
🆕 Topics:
- Algorithms and structures: Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, DFS-based topological sort, Coding: overview
- Dev tools: Introduction to Kubernetes
- JVM: Parallel GC
- DevOps: Best practices for writing Dockerfiles
- SQL and Databases: Sequences, The WITH statement, Aggregate operations, Explain, Import and export CSV files, Date and Time data types in SQLite
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.
That’s it for this month! We hope that you will find these updates valuable and that they will enhance your learning experience. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch with 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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