Did You Know?

Rock-paper-scissors is a hand game usually played by two people, where players simultaneously form one of three shapes with an outstretched hand. The “rock” beats scissors, the “scissors” beat paper and the “paper” beats rock; if both players throw the same shape, the game is tied.

Learning Objectives

By completing this challenge you will improve your programming skills using:

• Selection: Using if, elif and else statements.
• Iteration: Using either a for loop or a while loop.

The Game

Check the code below, it enables a player to play against the computer:

Challenge #1

Tweak the code below to allow the players to play 5 games. Keep a score and at the end of the 5 games display the final score and display who between the player and the computer is the overall winner.

Challenge #2

Adapt your code further to play using the best-of-5 playoff: a competition between two players (user and computer) head-to-head which must win three games to win the series. Three is chosen as it would constitute a majority of games played; if one team has won three games before all five games have been played, the games that remain are omitted.

Challenge #3

Adapt your code further to play using the best-of-5 playoff (as above) but where a lead of a minimum of two clear points is required to win the game. For instance you cannot win with a score of 3-2 but you can win with a score of 4-2. (Best of 5 with a 2-clear-point lead).

Learning objectives

In this challenge we will use string manipulation techniques to manipulate text data.
In Python a String is a piece of text. It can contain letters, numbers and punctuation signs.

Hello my name is Bond, James Bond

Look at the following code which highlights some key string manipulation techniques:

Using the code above can you tell how to use Python to:

• Prompt the user to enter their firstname?
• Concatenate two strings together to create a longer string?
• Retrieve the first character of a string?
• Convert a string to uppercase?
• Calculate the length (number of characters) of a string?
• Convert a number into a string?

Challenge:

Write a program that asks the end-user to enter the following information:

• Firstname
• Lastname
• Year Group

The program should then generate the end-user’s username using the following rules:

• 2-digit year group + first letter of firstname + lastname
• The username should be all lowercase
• If the year group is in 1 digit only (e.g.: 7) then add a “0” in front to make it two digits e.g. “07”

Test your program with the following data:

Firstname	Lastname	Year Group	Expected Output	Actual Output
John	Lennon	7	07jlennon
Paul	McCartney	11	11pmccartney
George	Harrison	8	08gharrison
Ringo	Starr	9	09rstarr

Learning Objectives

By completing this challenge we are going to learn how to define our own functions in Python.
We will also assign parameters to our functions.

Look at the code below used to calculate the volume of a cube. This code is based on the use of a function called getVolumeOfCube(). This function takes one parameter (width) and return the volume of the cube (in mL).

def getVolumeOfCube(width):
    volume = width * width * width
    #This calculates the volume in cubic millimeters. Divide it by 1000 to get this volume in mL
    volume=volume/1000
    return volume

#Main Program Starts Here
cubeVolume=getVolumeOfCube(50)
print("The volume of a cube with a side of 50mm is: " + str(cubeVolume) + " mL.")

Challenge #1:

Complete the following code to add 3 functions as follows:

• getVolumeOfCylinder(radius, height)
• getVolumeOfCuboid(width, length, height)
• getVolumeOfCone(radius, height)

Challenge #2:

Use all of your functions to calculate the volume of each of these bottles: