Landon's Science Questionnaire

I'm proud of my son and this was first attempt at applying his programming skills, at age 11, to a real competition aka the science fair :) He did well, but did not win. The UI was console based (NOT SHINY) as he was not familiar with how to build a fancy frontend at the time and i'm not the type of parent to do his work for him. Ergo, I believe the judges didn't really understand the amount of work he put into completing this project, or how the project really worked.

Notes about the script, its author, and the author of this read me

This is a simple python application that my 11 year old son wrote for his science fair. I wanted to teach him about web applications and consuming API's so we found a RESTful API oriented around real jeopardy questions. Thus, the goal was that given a category, the app would grab the first page of questions (100 per page) and ask those questions, checking the users answer to see if it is correct or as close as possible. We had to limit some categories due to types of answers and look for keywords as well as filter out markup that was returned in some of the answers.

The author of the documentation was me and I provided guidance as well. I've been doing python for 10+ years and javascript even longer, and c since I was ~13 years old, so I wanted to get my son involved as early as possible but also when he became interested via his own curiousity and volition. So after some time, some tutorials and a paid course, plus a few hours of me teaching, we have ended up with a pretty neat little game that we ran on a raspberry pi with a 10 inch HDMI LCD screen designed for connecting to the pi, as well as a battery and a specially crafted case to which the pi, battery, and screen were all mounted. This would allow him to simply close the container, pack it up, take it to school and then put it on display at the science fair. I felt the modularity alone was interesting but most people don't think like developers.

How to setup

This project uses python 3, so ensure you're using any version of python 3, then this script should work fine.

Clone the project into whatever directory you typically keep your code or repos. For example, a folder in home named repos. Note that you must have git installed, so if you do not please search on installing git for version control or perhaps using git-bash if you're running on windows. I highly recommend configuring git to use SSH and Github has easy steps to aid you in getting your ssh key generated as well as placing the right parts in the github settings page.

First, we will change directories and go into the directory where we want to clone the project, in this case thats the example folder named repos. Therefore,

$ cd ~/repos
$ git clone git@github.com:AndrewJHart/landons-app.git

Use your terminal to CD into your the root of your project code. For example our project is located in ~/repos/landons-app and since we should already be inside the repos direclty, we should be able to simply change directories to the project name and enter that folder like so:

$ cd landons-app

note, if for some reason you have issues getting into the directory, try the full path. note also that the ~ tilde key in terminal represents home. Thus, if the previous step failed for you, try this:

$ cd ~/repos/landons-app

Now, if you want rename the app to your own, simply change the folder from landons-app to whatever.

Next, if you already have python 3.x.x on your system then by all means please feel free to skip the next 2 steps and go down to the part of the document where we create the python3 virtual environment. Otherwise, please take heed and read these bits.

Next make sure you're running python3 and not the default install (on OSx anyway of 2.7) by typing

$ python --version

If the output is less than version 3, you need to install python 3. There is a fantastic tool called homebrew that will easily install the latest version, or whatever version you want, of python for you. Here is a guide on how to run both python 2 (which OSx requires) and python 3, so that you can use python 3 development and forget about python 2. Go here to learn how to install homebrew, and the latest version of python. In the end you should be able to run the command

$ python3 --version

and see the output you are expecting, e.g. 3.7.4 - just take caution to ensure you're including the number 3 after python when running code or building virtual environments or you may unwittingly cause your code to fail to run.

Assuming that you are successfully running the latest version of python 3, follow the next step.

Now we need to create a virtual environment. Why? Because unfortunately the python package manager pip installs all packages globally and this can cause a huge mess when you have multiple python apps depending on different versions of dependencies. You can look more into virtual env's later but for now lets create a python 3 virtual environment:

$ python3 -m venv venv

This will create a folder in your project directory named venv that will hold all the python package dependencies needed to run your project, without affecting any other projects. Essentially, you can now activate your virtualenv and all the dependencies you need to run your python project, will be stored in this local folder venv so as not to affect global python packages or versions.

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Next you need to activate the virtual environment to ensure your python dependencies are being installed only into the venv folder within the project directory. To activate the virtual environment run one of these two commands based on your operating system.

For Mac/OSx or Linux

$ . venv/bin/activate

For Windows

$ venv/Scripts/activate.bat

Now you have activated your virtual environment and it should show by prefacing your terminal prompt with the word (venv) in parenthesis!! Now, lets finally install all of our required dependencies that are used for this project e.g. third party dependencies that are not built in with python. All of these dependencies are stored in a file at the root of the project called requirements.txt. You can pass the -r flag to pip to tell it look inside this file and install the required dependencies into your local virtual environment.

To install all the required dependencies run the following command, calling pip install:

(venv)$ pip install -r requirements.txt

If everything works without any error messages then you have successfully installed the required libraries needed to run your script. Tada :)

Running the code

All thats left to do now is run the script :D - you can do this by executing this command in the terminal

(venv)$ python3 truth_game.py

If you see some questions popup on your terminal, answer them and then the game will begin! Then you have succeeded in running this python script (and most other python projects work similarly so you've gained some knowledge on how to manage python dependencies as well)

Some info about the questions/clues API and its creator

The RESTful API used for the questions, category, and answer data came from jservice.io/ and has been a great help in teaching my son about RESTful web services, how to fetch data from such services, as well as manipulating Lists and Dictionaries and transforming JSON response data into the these actual python data structures that can be manipulated. Much thanks to https://github.com/sottenad/jService for his github project!

Contributors

Author of documentation: Andrew Hart Author of python code: Landon Hart

Version Log

We didn't get to semver yet so...