Skip to main content

exercises

Exercises — progressive and extensive​

This curated set of exercises ranges from quick warm-ups to more substantial tasks suitable for a mini-project. Each exercise includes an estimated difficulty, suggested hints, and optional stretch goals.

Beginner (warm-ups)

1) Hello, name — difficulty: easy

  • Prompt the user for their first and last name and print: "Hello, Ada Lovelace!" using an f-string.
  • Hint: use input() twice or split a single input.

2) Sum of list — difficulty: easy

  • Given the list [3, 7, 2, 9], compute the sum first with a loop, then with sum().
  • Stretch: write a function that computes the sum without using sum() or loops (use recursion).

3) Even numbers filter — difficulty: easy

  • Write a function that takes a list of integers and returns a list with only the even numbers.

Intermediate (practice standard idioms)

4) FizzBuzz variant — difficulty: medium

  • Return a list for numbers 1..n with Fizz/Buzz/FizzBuzz rules rather than printing.
  • Add tests for n=1, n=15 and n=30.

5) Word frequency — difficulty: medium

  • Write a function that accepts a text string and returns a dictionary mapping words to counts (case-insensitive). Remove simple punctuation and normalise whitespace.
  • Stretch: return the top-k most frequent words.

6) Temperature parser — difficulty: medium

  • Accept inputs like "32F" or "0C" and convert to Celsius floats robustly. Handle malformed input.

Advanced (bigger tasks)

7) Grade calculator — difficulty: medium → hard (project)

  • Read a CSV where each line contains name,score1,score2,....
  • Compute per-student average, class average, and assign letter grades by configurable thresholds.
  • Output a CSV with name,average,grade and a short human-readable summary.

8) Simple search and index — difficulty: medium

  • Given a list of records (dicts with id and value), build an index mapping id to record for O(1) lookup.

9) Small algorithm — difficulty: hard

  • Implement a simple dedup-and-sort routine that takes a list of integers containing duplicates and returns a sorted list of unique values. Do not use set() for the first implementation; then implement using set() and compare performance for large inputs.

Hints and approach

  • Break problems into small functions; test each function.
  • Use assertions and simple test cases while developing.
  • For file-based tasks, start by writing code that works on in-memory strings and then adapt to files.

Assessment suggestions (for instructors)

  • Beginner tasks: correctness and basic input validation.
  • Intermediate: readability, tests, and handling of edge-cases.
  • Advanced: decomposition into functions, tests, and reasonable performance for inputs up to 100k items where applicable.

Use solutions.md only after attempting these tasks yourself. The solutions include one or more clear, well-documented approaches and notes on complexity.