Question

What would be a good set of programming exercises that would help Python newbies to learn the use of the “if … else” construct? I could cook up the following, do you know of any more?

1. Find the largest/smallest of three numbers.
2. Given a date (year, month, day), find the next date.

Most of the intended audience have not had much of an exposure to programming before, and I am keen on getting them used to thinking correctly about “if … else” (and all the rest of it, in due course).

Answer 1

It’s hard for those of us who have been programming for years to "get" what it feels like to start from nothing. I would steer clear of anything needing more than 5 lines of code.

You need to decide the order in which you cover things such as User Input, Output, if, else, while, for, file io etc.

When covering IF do they already know how to get some user input? Print some output? Code a FOR loop? Do arithmentic on integers? Determine whether a number is divisible by another number?

The answers to these questions constrains your examples for IF.

I’d suggest doing Output, Arithmentic, FOR, Divisibility (modulus), User Input before doing IF.

Then I can pose problems such as

Print the first 100 odd numbers
Determine the factors of a number entered  by the user
Play a number guessing game (User enters a guess, you print YES or Higher or Lower)