2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas
Turn inspirations into your passion project.
This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.
- AI/ML
- Animation
- Arts
- Biology
- Biotech
- Business
- Cancer
- Chemistry
- Cognitive
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Dance
- Dentistry
- Economics
- Engineering
- Entomology
- Environmental Science
- Ethics
- Fashion
- Finance
- Game Design
- Healthcare
- History
- Illustration
- Languages
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Nutrition
- Organizational Leadership
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Photography
- Physics
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Quantitative
- Social
- Social Science
- Sports Analytics
- Statistics
- Surgery
Data dashboard
Make your data stand out through the development of an interactive data dashboard. This project will enable you to learn how to structure your data, make your data talk to each other, and unleash your creative side.
Biology, Computer Science, Social Science, Business
Microcontroller Exploration and Embedded Systems
Microcontrollers are the heart of modern technology. They live inside everything from giant servers to smart devices. In this project, you will gain exposure to microcontrollers and embedded systems. You will learn about the various hardware and components in the systems, programming models, applications, wireless protocols (Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc.), and more. The final product will be either (1) a complete design project using microcontrollers (robot car. smart lock, etc.) or (2) a thesis-style report describing an application case study. Requirements: - Exposure to basic coding skills is helpful. - May need to purchase materials ($50-100 for electronics, up to the student) - Excitement to learn about a broad technology application!
Engineering, Computer Science
Research: from Experiment to Publication
Academic research in the laboratory is challenging and requires careful planning and consideration to successfully test a scientist’s hypothesis. Students on this project will take few hypotheses (anything in science or engineering is fair game) they are interested in studying and describe the laboratory experiments and statistics that would be required to validate or disprove them. This project would be well suited for students that plan to participate in science and engineering fairs and will help students describe the introductory information, methods, results, and discussion content they will be writing. The final project could be a roadmap for future laboratory work, a paper highlighting a project that was completed, or a poster describing the significance of a scientific work. Student will see how the steps in the scientific method come together, and gain experience with experimental design and planning experiments that will serve them well in their education and future careers in research. Students will improve their awareness of experimental techniques that are often used in the lab in their field of study, and work to integrate their knowledge of science with experimental design.
Biotech, Computer Science, AI/ML
Type System for Units of Measure
The goal of this project would be to explore a type system for units of measure (e.g. meters vs feet) in a beginner-friendly setting. The student would learn about formal type semantics before applying these ideas to expressing this problem in conjunction with prior research on the topic.
Computer Science, Math, Game Design
Baseball Swing Detection
Often, athletes find that human observation and input is necessary to assess the quality of their "game". Baseball players, golfers, or tennis players without personal trainers and thousands of dollars of equipment might be stuck trying to guess what went wrong with that last swing and how they can improve. Motivated by this, we can consider building a system that uses computer vision to help athletes improve their "game".
Computer Science, Math, AI/ML, Statistics
User-Friendly Network Analyzer
There are plenty of existing tools to help people analyze what's going on in their network, but it can be difficult for the average user to understand and diagnose issues just by using these tools. This project would create an application that takes data from these tools, infer things about the traffic in the user's network, and present the user with a summary of the findings.
Computer Science
Biking in the US
Look at how to make cities more bike friendly, looking at the history, and then propose solutions along with benefits/problems.
Computer Science, Social Science
Strategic Decision Making in Business
The project would include financial modeling and business data analysis learning how businesses make informed decisions and plan for the future. Financial modeling is a tool that helps predict the financial performance of a company based on various factors concerning their business environment. By analyzing business data — which involves scrutinizing numbers and trends from past and current business operations — you will develop insights that guide strategic decision-making. Whether you're looking at a small local business or a global corporation, these skills enable you to understand the financial underpinnings that drive success and sustainability in the business world. Students seeking career opportunities in finance, economics, or business would benefit from the emphasis on quantitative decision making.
Biotech, Computer Science, AI/ML
Making software fast (and safe)
The Rust programming language is quickly taking the world by storm. It is one of the fastest languages in terms of execution times (80x faster than Python in many cases), yet also one of the easiest languages to write in. In this project, I will help you learn to program in Rust, and how to port software written in other languages, such as Python, Java, and C/C++. We will use benchmarking tools to measure the speed of Rust code to equivalent code in other languages, and write a paper about the different languages' strengths and weaknesses.
Computer Science, AI/ML
Hijacking Physics to do Math for Us
We use math to do a lot of things, like run computers or make predictions. We also use math to describe physical behaviors in the world. But that also means that physical behaviors in the world "do math." In a sense, the world around us is constantly doing "calculations" with physics. In this project, we'll figure out a way to get the world to do our math for us, either in simulation or a simple physical system. We'll pick an example task (measure vibration/seismic activity over time, sense changes in shape, detect humidity, etc), and figure out how to make a reliable test without a computer. We'll think about experimental design, dealing with the noisiness of the real world, and critical data analysis.
Physics, Engineering, Computer Science, AI/ML
Predict gold content in minerals using machine learning
Apply different types of machine learning algorithms to geological data to try and predict gold concentrations in different ore samples. This project will be focused on writing a code using Python and studying different machine learning approaches.
Computer Science, Chemistry, Environmental Science
Looking inside the black box: why machine learning works
When we read about machine learning in media, it's often presented as a black box; that is, data goes in, the computer does some magic, and out comes a recommendation for which socks you will find most comfortable. While it is true that machine learning algorithms must be complex to solve complex problems, with a little bit of work, we can develop a remarkably deep understanding for why certain models behave as they do. Together, my student and I can pick a problem that we think machine learning might be able to offer a solution to. We can explore a variety of methods, experiment with them to see which may offer the best results, and dive into some theory to understand why we are seeing the results that we observe. At the end of our time together I hope that my student will have developed some experience with programming, will have learned some mathematics that they likely won't encounter again until they reach university and will be able to explain the core idea behind several machine learning methods. I would like to conclude our time together by authoring a technical piece of writing (or preparing a technical presentation) which encapsulates the work that we have done together.
Physics, Computer Science, Math, AI/ML
Mini Scientific Review
Many publishers want holistic reviews which start as mini-reviews that garner interest and spur the scientific world to investigate. In this project, you will review a biological topic such as "how vaccines work" or "COVAX program evaluation." This process will introduce you to the scientific world, review process, and publication process. You will gain writing skills, in-depth analysis skills, and editing skills.
Biology, Computer Science, Math, Public Health
Python Soundboard
Learn how to create a soundboard from scratch! Learn to 3D model a case, design circuits, and program your soundboard to make cool sounds or beats. Learn how buttons work on any device. Create a 3D modeled case for your new soundboard. Write the code needed to make your soundboard work!
Engineering, Computer Science
Summer side business
For the entrepreneurially-minded, looking for a side business - let's take your idea (or find an idea) and make sure you know how to obtain customers, keep track of financial records, and create a sustainable schedule.
Computer Science, Business
Smart Indoor Garden
Create an Indoor Garden from scratch and learn to 3D model, create circuits, and program devices in order to make a smart indoor garden! At the end, you get to grow your own plants! Create 3D model for the garden's tank. Create a circuit to power the LEDs. Create programs that allow us to record data and control devices in our garden. Learn what it takes in order to grow plants indoors.
Engineering, Computer Science
Text Generation Using Machine Learning
In this project, we'll explore how to generate text using machine learning. We'll start by picking a text dataset, such as freely available books or articles. The first step will be to clean and preprocess the data, a crucial part of any machine learning project. Next, we'll implement different machine learning methods, ranging from simple models like n-grams to more advanced approaches using neural networks. This will give us a chance to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each model. Finally, we'll evaluate our models, critiquing the quality of the text generated. Through this project, we'll gain practical experience with machine learning and develop a better understanding of the challenges involved in text generation.
Engineering, Computer Science, Math
Create an ML Model to classify images
We work together to learn Python (or skip this if you already know it), learn what a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is, build this model on a Kaggle dataset, and try to improve it through various techniques and layers to maximize our accuracy.
Computer Science, AI/ML
Writing a scientific review
Not ray for actual laboratory, or mathematical-computational research just yet? In this project, you will write a scientific review-style paper on a topic of your choice. Topics could range anywhere within STEM, from “how do computers work?” to “how do we know quantum mechanics is real?”. This process will teach you how to find, access, and critically analyze existing scientific literature and how to assemble primary literature into a scientific review. You will gain skills in writing and editing, as well as an in-depth knowledge of your chosen research topic.
Physics, Computer Science, Chemistry, Math
Who's a Good Dog? Classifying pet species with Machine Learning.
Dive into computer vision using convolutional neural nets in order to classify pet species. From a Saint Bernard to a Chihuahua, how well can you train a computer to predict the correct species of dog or cat? We'll use the available Oxford-IIIT Pet Dataset and Pytorch to build a model and experiment with hyperparameters.
Engineering, Computer Science, AI/ML
