The first step to starting a personal project is coming up with an idea to build upon. Here we'll outline steps to help you define a strong idea for your project.
You want to identify a problem that you aim to address with the completion of your project. It's important that the problem is clearly defined so it can guide you for planning the rest of the details regarding the project. Here are three aspects that you should consider when coming up with an idea:
For a personal project, it's beneficial to choose a problem that is of high interest to you so that you remain motivated to keep the project moving. If you can't stand to watch even one game of basketball, it probably wouldn't be the best idea for your project idea to be computing statistics about each college player to predict the March Madness bracket results (unless of course you're fully confident in your ability to do so and can make millions off of the prediction).
For example, if you are passionate about cooking, you may choose to address the problem of people struggling to cook meals due to a lack of time, knowledge, or ingredients.
You also want to make sure the problem you choose is something feasible to address. Poverty is a huge problem, but it's unlikely that one project will eliminate all of poverty, so you would need to better define the problem.
Instead of just making the problem "poverty", it would be better to make the problem "poverty in Binghamton" so you can develop a project that aims to reduce poverty for residents in Binghamton. This reduces the scope of the problem so that a solution is feasible.
It's just as important to determine the audience that the problem is affecting as it is to define the problem. Identifying who the problem is affecting will help you to better develop your project to cater to the needs of the audience and verify that the original problem is actually being addressed.
Determining the affected audience also helps you to allocate time and resources in the areas that are most important to achieving the final goal. It serves as a guide to what exactly needs to be done, how the project should be designed, what parts of the project are most important, and what goals to establish.
To build off of the cooking example, the people affected by the problem are people with limited cooking resources and knowledge. These people often include parents, busy people, college students, etc. The people affected are not likely to be top-notch chefs, so Rachael Ray probably won't be in the target audience. This is important to note for developing your project idea, because if you decide on a solution to give recipes, you're going to want to make sure the recipes are simple, easy, and fast so that those who are struggling with cooking are actually helped by the project.
After defining a problem and the audience that the problem affects, it's now time to figure out how to solve the problem. You want to make sure that your solution will actually address the problem and be beneficial for the audience affected by the problem.
It can be helpful to think of multiple solutions and consider the impact and feasibility of each one. While brainstorming solutions, you'll want to constantly refer back to the problem and who it affects.
To continue the example from before, the solution for the people who struggle to cook meals because they're too busy and/or lack cooking knowledge and ingredients could be creating a program in which people can input a list of ingredients that they have readily available and the program will output a list of recipes that only uses those ingredients. This will help prevent the issue of recipes including ingredients people don't have for those who are too busy to get to the store. There can be criteria on the recipes requiring them to be easy to make and to take 30 minutes or less so people in the target audience with low skill and little time will be helped by the program.