These are some general best practise tips how to organize your seminar project.

Set up a git account

git is a software that safes your work on the internet so you can always go back to earlier versions if something goes wrong. A bit like a backup system, but also great for collaborative work.

• install the "git" software on your computer
• go to github.com (or try gitlab.org) and get yourself an account.
• make there a new repository, and name it e.g. my-sample-project
• if it's a Python project, select the pathon template for the .gitignore file (this will ignore typical python temporary files for upload).
• go to the main repository page, open the "code" dropdown button and cope the "clone" URL.
• On your computer in a shell/terminal/console, go where your project should reside (I strongly encourage to use a path without whitespace in it) and type

  git clone <URL>

  and the project folder should be created and is linked with the git repository.

• learn about the basic git commands by searching for a quick tutorial (git cheat sheet).

install python

• install a python version, use version >= 3

set up a virtual environment

• enter your project folder,

  cd my-sample-project

• create a virtual environment that will contain all the python packages that you use in your project:

  virtualenv -p python3 my-project_env

  If virtualenv is not installed, you can either install it or create the environment with

  python3 -m venv my-project_env

• then activate the environment

  ./my-project_env/bin/activate

  (might be different for other operating systems)

• you should recognize the activated environment by it's name in brackets preceding the prompt, e.g. something like

  (my-project_env) user@system:/bla/path/$

Get yourself a python IDE

IDE means 'integrated desktop environment' and is something like a very comfortable editor for python source files. If you already know and use one of the many, I wouldn't know a reason to switch. If not, I'd suggest you take a look at VSC, the visual studio code editor as it's free of costs, available on many platforms and can be extended with many available plugins.

I've made a screencast (in German) on how to install python and jupyter notebooks on Windows