Challenge Accepted? 3 Python Questions to Test Your Skills

You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That’s how you know you’re still alive.” — Jerry Seinfeld

Have you ever walked from a bright room into a dark one? At first, everything seems impossible to see; its pitch black. But if you stay a little longer, your eyes will adjust, and you'll realize it's not as dark as you thought. This is similar to tackling Python challenges. Challenges may seem overwhelming at first, but with persistence, you will find solutions and gain a deeper understanding of the language. In fact, doing challenges is essential for mastering Python's fundamentals. This article presents three questions from the book "50 Days of Python: A Challenge a Day" to test your skills. Remember, if a question seems impossible at first, stick with it; the solution will likely become clear with a little effort.

Question 1: Finding Index and Handling Data

Can you find the exact positions (indexes) of specific values within the list? And can you cleverly modify the list by replacing certain elements with a new value? This is what the next question is testing. The key concepts that you will cover by answering this question include:

• Function definition and parameter passing

• List manipulation and indexing

• Conditional statements

• List comprehension or looping

Here is the question below:

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Question 2: Finding Missing Numbers in a Sequence

Iterating over a sequence of elements is one of the key fundamentals of Python. But can you iterate over a sequence of numbers while keeping track of the missing values in the sequence? How do you find the missing values? This question will test just that. By answering this question, the key fundamentals that you will cover include:

• Function definition and parameter passing

• List manipulation and iteration

• Conditional statements

• List comprehension or iteration

Here is the question below:

Question 3: Recording Student Marks

When you write Python code, you want to write Python code that not only works but is also robust. It is important to anticipate scenarios that may break your code so your code can handle them. This next question asks that you record student marks in a dictionary by prompting a user for input. Since you cannot always control what a user inputs into your program, your code should brace for invalid inputs from the user. By answering this question, the key Python fundamentals that you will cover include:

• Function definition

• Input/output operations

• Dictionary manipulation

• Loops

• Error handling

Here is the question below:

Conclusion

These three challenges will push you to combine various Python fundamentals, like loops, conditionals, functions, etc., to solve problems creatively. To get the most out of the challenges, resist the urge to peek at the solutions too quickly or to ask AI to solve them for you. Embrace the struggle! The longer you wrestle with a question, the deeper your understanding of these core concepts will become. So why not dive in and test your Python skills?