Hello, everyone! Well after hours of struggle, I finally managed to get the peak riddle solved. Very frustrating, but I think I learned a lot.
However on the channel one - I cant get any ideas. It may just be best for me to bow out at this point. One of my biggest problems has been that not only is python a new language to me, but it's my first step into programming at all: so many of the subjects that have come up in these riddles are "background information" i didnt have. Also very good things for me to learn (I'll have to learn a lot of non-python stuff if I want to learn programming!) but it does make it difficult at this beginning stage. It's too bad they dont have something like "Jr. Python Challenges" (!!) Actually, perhaps this is something you guys would know about! In your own learning python (or as you watched others learn, if you're one of the resident experts), have you come across some good challenges for python learners? I have worked on some, but here's what I have found: Too easy: every tutorial in the universe has a "guess my number" game, and there are only so many times you can create that one ;) Too much explanation: My current python book teaches by way of creating games, which I think is a great approach (that's what I'm interested in anyway). But it gives explicit instructions on how to do every single step. The end-of-chapter "additional challenges" have proved to be closest to what I am looking for: problems that take creative thinking, further research, and/or lots of experimentation to figure out. For instance - of course it had the guess my number game, but the chapter-end problem was to flip the roles so that the computer tried to guess the user's number. Not terribly difficult, but fun to work with. Too little explanation/direction: At least for a beginner, it's helpful to have some idea of what you're trying to do ;) I also worked with the Livewires worksheets, altho there were a couple of their suggested exercises I could not get (for instance: when I was working on my space invaders game and trying to figure out how to render text onto the screen, one of the livewires extra tasks was to do something exactly like that. But it didnt have anything about rendering text in the course!) I think a really good example was the Regular Expressions puzzle in the python challenges. I didnt know anything about regular expressions, but there was enough of a hint so that I could find the right module/library/direction, and, after reading it through a handful of times and trying a bunch of things out (with a helpful nudge or two in the right direction), I could solve the riddle *and* I really feel like I learned something about regular expressions. I definitely do want to learn some of these more complicated topics, and I think that challenge really worked for me. So if anyone has a source of other challenges, I would really love to see them. I need things to practice on! :) I like the way the python challenges are set up, I'm just stuck where I am right now and there's only the one to work on at a time so I'm pretty much at a loss there, at the moment. I know there are a lot of new learners here who would probably also appreciate challenges to try! ~Denise P.S. I still keep looking at riddle #6, even tho it's getting me nowhere. I might try just searching python docs for channels or loops or zippers or something. ha ha ;) _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
