The task for the first Python challenge was to create a script that analyzes the financial records (this data was given to us as a CSV file) of a fictional company and calculates: the total number of months in the dataset, net total amount of profit or losses over the entire period, average of the changes in profit or losses, date and amount of the greatest increase in profits, and date and amount of the greatest decrease in losses. The second challenge's task was similar, just in a different context. Tasked to modernize a fictional town's vote-counting process via coding, we were given a much larger CSV file (of more than 3.5 million rows), and were asked to find: the total number of votes cast, a complete list of candidates who received votes, percentage of votes each candidate won, total number of votes each candidate won, and winner of the election based on popular vote. The analysis for both of these were printed to the terminal, and exported as a text document.
Learning Objectives for Unit 3 - Intro to Python
- Be able to navigate the desktop via the terminal.
- Create Python scripts and run them in terminal.
- Begin to understand programming concepts in Python.
- Feel confident reading data into Python from CSV files.
- Feel confident writing data from Python into CSV files.
- Know how to zip two lists together and when this is helpful.
- Have a firm understanding on how to create and use Python functions.
- Be able to create and use Python dictionaries.
- Be able to read data in from a dictionary.
- Have a firm understanding of coding logic and reasoning.