Welcome to Arduino!
An Arduino is a great low cost micro-controller that can be used for interacting with hardware. You can communicate with an Arduino through Python to add hardware elements to your project.
Using an Arduino is fairly difficult as your code is not the only source of potential bugs. Therefore it is recommended that you have some Arduino/circuitry experience before attempting to integrate an Arduino into a term project.
All of the starter code can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tBdvWTHme5eBLLERUP1QU4pVDVoGw9Ly