Thoughts from the author: The problems are sorted by difficulty within each section. Some of these problems are pretty hard. Work together! Ask Questions!

Pre-Lesson Homework: do the first 2 pythonprogramming.net tutorials. Post-Lesson Homeowrk: do the next 2 tutorials. Do any of these problems that you thought were interesting.

pdf version of this tutorial: day1.pdf

#Easy Stuff Demo program:

  name = input()
  print("Hello "+ name)

Problem 1

Create a program that prints all even numbers up to your age. -From “Python for kids”

Problem 2

Create a program that asks someone for their name, and then compliments them.

Problem 3

Create a number guessing game. (“Im thinking of a number in [1,100]” User says “high and low”, computer guesses numbers)

Number Theory Stuff

Demo program: check if a number is a perfect square:

  def checkIsSquare(n):
    i = 1
    while i*i <= n:
      if n == i*i:
        return True
      i+=1
    return False

Problem 4

Write a program to compute the \(n\)-th fibonacci number. Recall \(f_0=f_1=1\), \(f_n=f_{n-1}+ f_{n-2}\).

Bonus: use linear algebra to do it in time \(O(\log n)\)

Problem 5

Write a program that makes an array with \(x[i]\) indicating whether \(i\) is prime or not.

Problem 6

Write a function that checks if a number is prime.

Problem 7

Write a program to compute the greatest common divisor of two numbers.

Hint: you can bash it, or do the euclidean algorithm

Encryption Stuff

Demo: reverse cipher

"".join([chr(26-(ord(x)%26)+ord('a')) for x in input_string])

Problem 8

Make a program that does a Caesar Cipher. That is, it takes in some english text, and cyclically shifts all the letters by some key, for example 1.

Signal Stuff

Demo program: makes a graph of some noise.

  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  import numpy as np
  data = np.random.rand(100)
  plt.plot(data)
  plt.show()

Problem 9

Print a thousand random numbers.

Problem 10

Generate a random signal with 1000 data points. Plot it. Make a smoothed version of the signal.

Hint: use moving average