[Tutor] challenges - general

[D. Hartley]

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 ;)