The Sunfish project, github.com/thomasahle/sunfish describes a simple chess engine, a little over 100 lines of Python (plus some data files), that plays at an Expert level. Load the project, experiment with it, see what you can learn, and what you can improve. Suggestions: 

a. Improve the speed with a bitboard representation, parallel search, or a port to C or Rust. 

b. Explain how the MTD search improves on alpha-beta without set bounds. 

c. Add some endgame information.

d. Add extensions to search when the board is in a nonquiescent state. 

e. Run experiments where you compare two versions of Sunfish, with and without a change, and see which one wins more in a series of games.