[fuball63]

I always like to use games as small projects. They usually require the use of a wide variety of programming concepts, and can be scaled up or down as needed.

If you know GUI like Swing or AWT, you can use that to do simple games like space invaders or pong.

If not, text based games work too. Good examples are battleship, tic tac toe, number guessing games, small adventure games, or dice and card games.