Daily Problem Solving Practice

Throughout the rest of this inning, you’ll have time carved out in most days to practice the skills we learned today. For each challenge, you’ll spend 15 minutes planning and pseudocoding. You will not actually solve or code anything. You will use the following prompts to flex and strengthen your problem solving skills, not your coding knowledge or syntax.

Focus on running through steps 1-5 for each prompt.

Problem Solving Process

1. Restate the goal in your own words. Take note of EXACTLY what the final output(s) should be.
2. Consider the data that you’re working with. What data types are you working with? Are there any parameters/arguments? What data in particular do you need access to?
3. Ask clarifying questions that you have about the goal and/or the data. Is there anything that still unclear? It is critical that you have a complete and accurate idea of the goal and data before you move on.
4. Pseudocode the steps needed to get to the goal. Write out your plan, with specific steps, in plain English. What will you need to do first? Then what?… Note: You may only be able to pseudocode out the first couple of steps - that’s okay! Plan out as much as possible now.
5. Research what you don’t know. Is there something you’ve noted in your pseudocode that you don’t know how to do? Take note of that and google.
6. Start coding by referencing the pseudocode you’ve written.
7. Stuck? Go back to step 4 and repeat steps 4-6 until you’ve reached your goal.
8. Refactor your code, if necessary. You should not be worried about writing the “best” code possible while solving the problem. Get it to work, then you can work on improving the code.