Summer holiday Coding Practice Tasks
The summer holidays are a great time to ignore your friends, lock your front door, close you curtains and generally shun the outside world for the coder lifestyle!
Just kidding, but if you want to hit the ground running in year 11, ready for your controlled assessment, then you need to keep practicing and improving your coding skills! These coding challenges will help you keep improving your coding skills!
What if I don’t like these challenges?
Don’t like them? Want to pick your own challenge instead? Great! These challenges are just the ones I came up with – it doesn’t matter what you code, all coding makes you a better coder, so feel free to do your own project instead!
Beginner – Reaction timer game
Make a reaction timer game using Python to test the user’s reaction time.
The game should work as follows:
- The game displays ‘ready’ on the screen.
- The game then waits a random amount of time.
- The game the displays ‘hit enter’
- The game should then work out how long it took ( in Milliseconds) for the user to press enter and should display the user’s time.
Additional challenge game improvements.
Got your game working?
Try adding these improvements:
- Add a high score table to your game.
- Add a ‘red herring’ option so that the user has to make sure they only hit enter when the correct message is displayed.
To do List Program
Create a Python program that allows users to keep track of things they have to do.
You program should allow users to:
- Add an item to the list and set it it a priority (High/Medium/Low)
- Save to do list data to a file
- Remove an item from the list
- Mark an item as completed
- View all items in the to do list and sort by alphabetical / priority / date order.
Medium – GUI Todo List
Please note this task cannot be completed using PythonAnywhere.com – You will have a to use an installed version of Python.
The aim of this challenge is to create a todo list program, but instead of using the command line, make a GUI program using Tkinter.
A beginner’s tutorial can be found at:
http://zetcode.com/gui/tkinter/introduction/
Insane – Make a game using Pygame
Please note this task cannot be completed using PythonAnywhere.com – You will have a to use an installed version of Python.
Want a really hard challenge? Pick a game from the list of games below and try making the game using Python Pygame.
Games list – http://inventwithpython.com/blog/2012/02/20/i-need-practice-programming-49-ideas-for-game-clones-to-code/
There are plenty of Pygame tutorials online, Youtube has plenty of tutorials!