Intermediate Python

In this lesson, students review some Python fundamentals while building an “Odds and Evens” app. We’ll review how to define functions, get user input, generate random numbers, create game loops, and much more.

In this lesson, students learn how to read and write text files in their Python programs. Reading and writing files is a common task for Python programmers, so this knowledge is fundamental to becoming a well-rounded Pythonista. 

In this lesson, students continue learning how to read and write text files in Python. They build a “Guess The Country” app, which pulls random countries from the filesystem and hides random letters of the country from the user.

In this lesson, students learn a few more techniques for reading a writing text files such as dealing with text files with a header, breaking string data into a list, and using multiple assignment to pull all values from a list. The day’s project (a “Guess The Number” app) also allows students to practice techniques they’ve learned throughout the course to ensure they have a solid grasp of reading and writing text files before moving on to CSV and JSON files.

In this lesson, students learn about the CSV file format, a standard data format exported by spreadsheet software such as Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. They’ll use Python’s native CSV module to read and write CSV data while building a simple movie rating app (PyMDB) in a similar style to apps like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes.

In this lesson, students continue working with CSV files while building a “Password Manager” application. We’ll explore how to use Python’s DictReader and DictWriter classes to structure our CSV data as a Python dict (dictionary).

In this lesson, students learn about JSON, the final data format we’ll work with during this course. The JSON format is one of the most popular ways to exchange structured data between programs, and we’ll use JSON to manage user data for a fictional social media app called “MyFace”. 

In this lesson, students begin learning about APIs. Most of the class is an interactive exploration in the web browser of how APIs are used to exchange data between machines on the modern internet and where to find free, public APIs hosted on GitHub (a site where developers collaborate and share code). The skills taught in this lesson unlock unlimited application possibilities, as students can now use public APIs to build more advanced applications.

In this lesson, students learn how to search and filter API data using query parameters. To practice this new skill, they’ll build an app that searches the Art Institute of Chicago’s API for artwork based on a given search term. 

In this lesson, students learn how to work with APIs that require an API key. We walk through registering for an API key and then build a “News Search” app that uses the Guardian OpenPlatform API to find news articles related to a search term. 

In this lesson, students begin building the final project: a “Search Engine” app. The app will allow users to search for data from three different APIs (which will provide information for various books, artworks, and news articles) and save the desired results to the filesystem. 

In the final lesson of this course, students finish building their “Search Engine” app from the previous class. They’ll review how to read and write JSON data from the filesystem and deal with complex nested JSON data structures while implementing the final parts of the app. Parsing nested JSON is a common task for professional programmers, and now that they’ve completed this course, the students are well on their way to joining their ranks!