Help with some python homework...

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 5:24 PM, sjud9227 <scottwd80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you so much Chris.  However, i'm still a little confused.  Doesn't assigning seconds/(60*60) mean that calculating 6*hours will give me 6 hours in seconds?  Also, why calculate how many seconds from midnight?  wouldn't it just be from the time that you left the house at 6:52?  Also, for the life of me I cannot figure out how to make everything display in hh:mm:ss.  I realize I'm asking a lot especially do to the fact it's homework but, we are allowed help in class I just don't have class again until next Tuesday.  Plus I really do want to learn not just get the answers.

First things first: You're using Google Groups, so your lines are
unwrapped and your quoted text is double spaced. Please fix this every
time you post (which requires some fiddling around) or switch to a
client that works. I recommend using the mailing list instead:

https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

Now then.

What is your initial seconds? With the code you posted, it's 1, which
means you get nothing at all after dividing by (60*60), so you just
have a big ol' zero.

What you need to do is convert hours into seconds. Is that going to
mean multiplying by a big number or multiplying by a very small
number? Think about it as something completely separate from
programming. What number will you be multiplying by? Now code that.

You can calculate the total number of seconds of your run. You can
calculate the number of seconds from midnight until 6:52AM. Add the
two together and you get the number of seconds from midnight until you
get home.

The final step, formatting, is pretty straight-forward. Let's suppose
I have a number of seconds, say 40000. That represents some number of
hours, some number of minutes, and some number of seconds. How many
complete hours are there in 40000 seconds? How many seconds are left
over? And out of those left-over seconds, how many minutes can you
make? How many seconds are left after the minutes are taken out? These
questions are all answered by division and modulo operations. You can
actually solve this completely separately from the other part of the
problem; try answering it for the figure I gave (40000 seconds), then
try it for a few other numbers, and see how it goes.

ChrisA