Intro to Programming and Data Science (Spring 2020)/Day 2 Coding Challenges

From CommunityData

As a reminder, it's not essential that you solve or get through all of these — I'm not grading your answers on these. That said, being able to work through at least many of them is a good sign that you have mastered the concepts for the week. It is always fine to collaborate or work together on these problem sets. The only thing I ask is that you do not broadcast answers on Brightspace more than 24 hours before class.

Required[edit]

  • Finish DataCamp Intro to Python Chapter 1
  • Python for Everyone Exercises:
    • Chapter 1: Exercises 1, 6, 7
    • Chapter 2: Exercises 2, 3, 4, 5
    • Chapter 3: Exercises 1, 2, 3*
    • Chapter 4: Exercises 1-4*, 5, 6, 7*

(Starred exercises are optional; if you feel like you need more practice in a topic)

Additional Challenges[edit]

Check out the Wordplay project which was developed for a different version of this course (and which we may come back to later).

Challenges about finding words:

  1. Find all words that start with 'a' and are 9 or more letters long.
  2. What is the longest word that starts with a 'q'?
  3. Find all words that end with 'nge'
  4. Find a word that matches "a*ey" (here "*" means any letter). Are there any words that match?
  5. Print every other word that matches the condition in (1) above.
  6. Find at least one word that uses all five vowels in order.
  7. For every letter, print the word that uses that character the most. (Hint: use two nested for loops. First one is
   for letter in 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz':
       # do something
  1. (Challenge) Find the longest string where no character appears more than 1 time. (Hint: look up counters)


Use Python to find one other interesting fact about the data set. Examples (that you can't use) might be:

  • One of the words that is tied for the most vowels is aquifoliaceous
  • The word with the highest consonant to vowel ratio is sulphhydryls