some problems for an introductory python test

[Abhiram R]

Hello,
One of my absolute favorite places to go to practice Python questions from
is https://projecteuler.net . It's just Maths based questions that cannot
be solved by hand without consuming a Ton of time because of the high
limits.
This is how I learnt Python. By solving problems from the site in Python!
Happy to provide more tips wrt this if required.

Regards
Abhi R <http://abhiramr.com>

On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 2:56 AM Hope Rouselle <hrouselle at jevedi.xotimo>
wrote:

> I'm looking for questions to put on a test for students who never had
> any experience with programming, but have learned to use Python's
> procedures, default arguments, if-else, strings, tuples, lists and
> dictionaries.  (There's no OOP at all in this course.  Students don't
> even write ls.append(...).  They write list.append(ls, ...)).
>
> I'd like to put questions that they would have to write procedures that
> would would be real-world type of stuff, without error checking,
> exceptions and such.  So if you think of something more or less cool
> that uses loops, we can sometimes simplify it by assuming the input has
> a certain fixed size.
>
> I came up with the following question.  Using strings of length 5
> (always), write a procedure histogram(s) that consumes a string and
> produces a dictionary whose keys are each substrings (of the string) of
> length 1 and their corresponding values are the number of times each
> such substrings appear.  For example, histogram("aaaaa") = {"a": 5}.
> Students can "loop through" the string by writing out s[0], s[1], s[2],
> s[3], s[4].
>
> I'd like even better questions.  I'd like questions that would tell them
> to write procedures that would also have inverses, so that one could
> check the other of the other.  (A second question would ask for the
> inverse, but hopefully real world stuff.  One such question could be
> parsing a line separate by fields such as "root:0:0:mypass:Super User"
> and another that gives them ["root", 0, 0, ...] and asks them to write
> "root:0:0:mypass:..."  You get the idea.)
>
> Students know how to use str().  But they don't know how to use type(),
> so they can't really check for the type of the input.  I probably
> couldn't ask them to write a prototype of a tiny subset of pickle, say.
>
> I think you get the idea.  I hope you can provide me with creativity.  I
> have been looking at books, but every one I look at they introduce loops
> very quickly and off they go.  Thank you!
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>


-- 
-Abhiram R