Python Projects

This is a walkthrough of my Python projects that I did in my CSE231 class, and I will discuss what new features each project included from the next.

I started coding in the Fall of 2020 in CSE 231: Introduction to Programming I. This is a course in Python, and is meant for people who have little to no experience in coding like I was.

CSE 231 covered a large part of Python. I learned about types, data structures, functions, selection and iterator, classes, and file processing. Each week there was a project that would use what we had previously learned and the new material of that week.

The first project was a basic project that would do measurement conversions. Given a number of rod(s), it would do numerical conversions to other lengths. There is no main, and only global variables are used. This project code in its entirety and an example run is shown below.

one_rod = 5.0292 #meters
furlong = 40 * one_rod
mile = 1609.34 #1 mi = mile (in meters)
foot = .3048 #meters
average_walking_speed = 3.1 #(miles per hour)
aws = average_walking_speed
aws = 3.1 / 60 * 1609.34 #in meters/min


rods_str = input("Input rods: ")
rods_float = float(rods_str)
print("You input", rods_float, "rods.")

Meters = (one_rod * rods_float)
Feet = ( Meters / .3048)
Miles = (Meters / 1609.34)
Furlongs = (rods_float / 40)
Min_to_walk = (Meters / aws)

Meters = round(Meters, 3)
Feet = round(Feet, 3)
Miles = round(Miles, 3)
Furlongs = round(Furlongs, 3)
Min_to_walk = round(Min_to_walk, 3)

print("\nConversions")
print("Meters:", Meters)
print("Feet:", Feet)
print("Miles:", Miles)
print("Furlongs:", Furlongs)
print("Minutes to walk", rods_float, "rods:", Min_to_walk)
#Output below when program is run
Input rods: 5
You input 5.0 rods.

Conversions
Meters: 25.146
Feet: 82.5
Miles: 0.016
Furlongs: 0.125
Minutes to walk 5.0 rods: 0.302

There is no recusion with this code, it is one and done. This was my first project in CSE 231, and looking at it right now there are things that I would change, the least of which would be to make functions and now have global namespace variables.

The next week was an introduction to conditionals (if, elif, else) and loops (for, while). There is still not main, but using while I was able to prompt the user to see if they would want to run the program again, instead of having to restart and recompile it.

Week 3 was making a program that would calculate tuition based on user inputs to questions. It was the first project that used the string module and used .format for print statements. There are still global variables present and most of the code runs under a single while loop.

Project 4 was the first project that used functions. It also is the first project that used lists in Python. Additionally, there are no more global variables present! This project practiced the use of functions. The user was given 8 options, which are:

Option A converts a decimal number to a number of specified base. Option B converts a number from a specified base to decimal. Option C converts from one base to another while both bases are between two and ten. Option D displays the sum of two binary numbers. Option E compresses an imagine formed by binary numbers. Option U uncompresses a compression that is in the same form as E. Option M displays the menu. Option X quits the program.

This project was the hardest project for me; it took over 12 hours to do. Most of that time lays in getting options E and U to work.

Option E would take a string of any length that would be composed of 1’s and 0’s. The output would be a compressed string. The output would be a string whose length is a factor of 8. For every 8 in the string, the first character would be the type (1 or 0), and the remaining 7 are a binary representation of how many there are repeated. So a 32 string of 0’s would output as 00100000.

Option U would take a string of a multiple of 8 and decode this compression.

This decompression and compression were both equally hard, and looking at my code I can see a lack of comments which makes me unable to understand a few parts of the code. The use of while statements to run the main could also be improved, and there is a lot of repetition. However, it is the first program to use functions and at this point, writing code to follow style guides and keeping function length down was not something that was considered or even known about.

Project 5 is the first program that reads data from a file based on user input, and is the first program to use try-except. It reads from a .csv file that has information about Covid-19 deaths and would do calculations on that data and output.

Project 6 expanded on reading from files and using functions. This read data about nuclear reactors in each state and would output information based on what the user requested. It also used nested lists, tuples, and list indexing. It was a test of what I was able to do with lists and made sure that I could use them. There was also more automation. The length of list items was not constant, so len was used to help make the code more adaptive.

Project 7 was more practice with lists, tuples, and sets. This would read earthquake data and visualize the location, magnitude, and damage from past earthquakes. It can show the damage caused by all earthquakes in a single year, the magnitude and location of each earthquake, and the total damages caused by these earthquakes in a year range.

Project 8 was the first project that used dictionaries. This project would build a dictionary where each key is a mineral, and the value is foods from the textfile that have that mineral. The textfile would have a food and then all of the minerals, so this would have to flip what was being made. The dictionary values were a set of food so there would be no repeats.

This program would read the user input of three minerals, either required foods that have one of them or all of them, and the program would return foods that match the requirements.

Project 9 was a project that wanted us to get more experience with lists, dictionaries, data structures, functions, iteration, and data analysis. This program took a .csv file of public data about the quantifications of several factors that can influence happiness. Functions were written to get and format the data from the .csv file. The top 10 countries would be ranked based on their happiness score across several years, and individual countries can have their data index for health, freedom, family, etc. seen for specified years.

Project 10 was the first use of classes in Python. For our first use of classes, we were provided a class to practice how to use class objects and member functions. This would make a game of scorpion solitaire for you to play with all of the rules

Project 11, the last project, was making a game of pokemon. Two classes were made, Move and Pokemon. Move is the class for each move that a Pokemon would have. It stored all of the attributes of a move like accuracy, type, element, etc as well as functions in the form of get_attribute that would return it so you don’t call the attribute directly. It also included the basic functions of str and repr that allow it to be printed. Pokemon had the same layout of get_attribute which would return the attribute. It would make a moves list, that would get 4 moves from a file for the pokemon that matched its type. It had output for the statistics of each move, and the attack, which is when a pokemon would attack another. This member function calculated the damage and if the attack would be successful or not, and modified the enemy pokemon’s HP.

This final project was the most complex as two custom classes were made and then had to be used to fight. Even though this is the most complex project, the use of classes allowed for the implementation file to be very simple. The main function shows drastic improvement over older projects in terms of clarity and simplicity. Instead of having a lot of functions written into main, all operations were in separate functions and simply called. No real calculations were done except for basic addition and then a while loop to simulate the battle.

These projects can be seen from this GitHub link at the top of the page and here. These projects show rapid development of my Python skill as I learned new methods and the language.