My reflection is interactive!

Here’s my original 8-ball …

Here’s the improved version!

Transcript-ish of my interactive reflection:

We’ve learned a lot using turtle in class so far . . .

like programming shapes turtle.circle(),
color changes turtle.color(),
and written messages turtle.write().

We’ve also learned some functional commands:

we can change speed turtle.speed(),
reorient ourselves turtle.right(),
and draw using angles and lines turtle.forward().

A huge breakthrough for me was figuring out how to randomize printed strings. I wanted to play around with making a sassy magic 8-ball, so I fumbled through importing random from the Python library, tested a few routes like assigning random integers to strings, and then realized I could generate a random string from a list:

input("What do you wish to ask?")
list1 = ["Ur mom.", "None of your business!", "Why would I know that??"]
y=random.choice(list1)
print(y)

Because the strings are randomized (and because I included more string options in the final code), you likely won’t get the same answer each time. But even if you didn’t ask a question, you still got an answer. I wanted to play with conditionals to try to vet out non-questions. To do this, I had to define the input() and check it against some conditions.

question = input("What do you wish to ask?")

if "?" in question:
  list1 = ["Ur mom.", "None of your business!", "Why would I know that??"]
  y=random.choice(list1)
  print(y)
else:
  print("That's not a question!")

I realized though that people suck at punctuation, so I tried to add more options that could be in a question for it to count as a question.

question = input("What do you wish to ask?")

if "who" in question or "Who" in question or "what" in question or "What" in question:
  list1 = ["Ur mom.", "None of your business!", "Why would I know that??"]
  y=random.choice(list1)
  print(y)
else:
  print("That's not a question!")

It’s not perfect by any means. If someone, for example, inputs “I don’t know what to ask” a random string will be generated because “what” was still inputted, even though “I don’t know what to ask” isn’t a question.

The question-vetting isn’t foolproof and I’d like to learn more skills to counteract that. Additionally, I’m excited to go further into boolean operators, functions, and debugging. I want to learn how to repeat sections of code so that the user can ask the 8-ball as many questions as they’d like.

Finally, my code is outright messy! I can’t wait to practice streamlining, optimizing, and oranizing code.

I’m excited to practice more! Cheers to learning! :)