How can students with basic programming knowledge work on AI project ideas?

Engineering colleges have resumed new sessions - and colleges have asked students to finalise their project ideas. A lot of engineering students are now finding the best ideas to work on - and AI seems to be the hot favourite among the professors and students.

I'm however wondering if there's a way for the students, with basic knowledge of programming to actually work on AI project ideas. One possible way is to use available machine learning services offered by leading providers; but then learning them and implementing them requires lot of reading and knowledge of computing systems. 

Is there any way students can work on simplest of the AI project ideas? Say - recognising geometric shapes? Is that too 'basic'?

When we speak about shape recognition, its about having an algorithm which is already trained in that specific identification model.

Say if we want to train a model which should identify geometric shapes, it should have ideally been trained on lot of shapes so that that algorithm can identify/classify which shape it belong to.

SO if we google and find a trained algorithm on lot of 2D shapes, we can reuse it and classify given testing shapes.