Practice Problems

Everything on this page is optional content. To learn the course material, focus first on participating in lecture and recitation, completing the exercises, and completing the assignments. You can then use these practice materials if you'd like additional practice.

• OLI Problems
• TA-Generated Problems
• External Problems

OLI Problems

Past instructors for the course have implemented practice problems with answer-checking and correct solutions in OLI, the Online Learning Initiative. To sign up for the OLI course, go to https://oli.cmu.edu/students/, click 'Register with Course Key', log in through your CMU account, then enter the course key: 15-110-F24
If this does not seem to work, email the instructors and we will check if there are additional setup steps necessary for this semester.
There are currently OLI modules on:

• Introduction to Python
• Function Calls
• Conditionals
• For Loops
• Strings
• Lists
• Recursion
• Dictionaries
• Big-O Runtime
• Trees
• Graphs
• Simulation

TA-Generated Problems

Past course TAs have generated practice problems for each lecture of the course. You can find PDFs for each lecture's problems below. Note that these have not been thoroughly reviewed by this semester's course staff, but they should be useful nevertheless.

• Unit 1
  • Algorithms and Abstraction
  • Programming Basics
  • Data Representation
  • Function Calls
  • Function Definitions
  • Booleans, Conditionals, and Errors
  • Circuits and Gates
  • While Loops
  • For Loops
  • String Indexing, Slicing, and Looping
• Unit 2
  • Lists and Methods
  • Recursion
  • Recursion II & Search Algorithms
  • Dictionaries
  • Runtime and Big-O Notation
  • Trees
  • Graphs
  • Search Algorithm II
  • Tractability
• Unit 3
  • Parallel Programming
  • How the Internet Works
  • Authentication and Encryption
• Unit 4
  • Data Analysis I
  • Simulation I
  • Machine Learning
  • Data Analysis II
  • Simulation II
  • Artificial Intelligence
• Unit 5

External Problems

Here are some helpful websites that host Python practice problems! Note that the problems you find on these websites may not always align with the content being taught in class.

• CodeCheck (basics to dictionaries)
• codingbat (basics to lists)
• 15-112 Website (challenging practice problems)
• Project Euler (solve math problems with code)