StartHacking Final Project

Now that you've seen the behind the scenes of how some software works, it's your turn to try your hand at writing some code!

We started writing some of the code for a console trivia game, but it's your job to help us finish it up and implement the functions that are missing.

Introduction

To make a trivia game, first we need a way to generate trivia questions and answers. To do this, we use the OpenTDB API to get random questions and answers to those questions. OpenTDB API works by sending a request to one of their URLs and it returns a dictionary of the question, answers, and descriptions of the question. You can see an example of one of these dictionaries here. If you want to learn more about how sending the request works, you can look at the Getting Questions section.

We already wrote the code to get questions from OpenTDB, your task is to fill in the functions to get the game running.

Getting Started

This project has 2 main files: game.py and question_generator.py. game.py is the code for running the game -- this is where you will be writing your code for the game. question_generator.py is the code for getting questions for our game; we have already imported that in game.py (you can see it at the top of the file that we imported get_question to the file).

Downloading the Project

To develop this project, we used GitHub. GitHub is a way for people to share code and collaborate (like Google Drive for code!). GitHub is also a good way to save your code online in case you lose it on your computer (this is called version control, which you can learn more about here).

You can download the project to your computer by downloading a zip file or using git. If you have a GitHub account and it is configured on your computer, open your terminal and run git clone https://github.com/techx/starthacking-project.git or git clone git@github.com:techx/starthacking-project.git if you have your SSH key configured on GitHub. If you do not have git configured, you can click the green "Clone or Download" button and click "Download ZIP".

Making the Game

We already wrote the code for getting the questions in question_generator.py; now it's your turn to go through game.py and finish the functions that say pass or places that say TODO so we can actually use the questions in a trivia game. Each function has a description on what they're supposed to do, so your task is to implement the functions so that it works as described.

We can start by looking at the bottom of the page where it says if __name__ == "__main__:". This is the part of the file that will run when you run python game.py. To get this to work, make sure that the main section and each function are fully implemented.

Once you are satisfied, you can test your game by running python game.py in your terminal in the directory of the project. If you have it working and you want to try some more challenges, you can try those listed in Optional Challenges. If you find a bug, try to go through the game again and debug the code.

You only need to change game.py to finish the game. If you want to try the optional challenges or see how we use the API, you can look through question_generator.py.

Getting Questions

When we enter a URL into our browser, there are typically 2 major parts to the URL. If we look at the URL https://opentdb.com/api.php?amount=10, this is saying that we want to access the https://opentdb.com/api.php server and pass in an argument amount=10. These are separated by the ? in the URL. In this case, amount is the number of questions we want to get. If we want 5 questions, we can go to the URL https://opentdb.com/api.php?amount=5. If you want to get 5 questions and set the difficulty to medium, we can pass in multiple arguments by separating them with & like https://opentdb.com/api.php?amount=5&difficulty=medium.

If you want to learn more about how APIs work, click here. If you want to learn more about OpenTDB API, click here.

Optional Challenges

If you finish the project early and would like to try and tackle some of our challenges, try your hand at implementing these features (you may have to look into question_generator.py for some of these):

• Prompt user to select difficulty at the beginning of the game
• Prompt user to select number of questions at the beginning of the game
• Prompt user to select category at the beginning of the game (look at Categories for the API for category IDs)
  • You should prompt the user for an input in a user-friendly manner. In other words, you should not assume that the user knows the category IDs beforehand.
• Make the game keep asking questions until user gets one wrong (instead of having a set number of questions)

If you find yourself stuck, check out the Hints section below

Categories for the API

The category argument for the API uses category IDs rather than category names for selecting a category. Below is the mapping of category IDs to category names:

ID	Name
9	General Knowledge
10	Entertainment: Books
11	Entertainment: Film
12	Entertainment: Music
13	Entertainment: Musicals & Theatres
14	Entertainment: Television
15	Entertainment: Video Games
16	Entertainment: Board Games
17	Science & Nature
18	Science: Computers
19	Science: Mathematics
20	Mythology
21	Sports
22	Geography
23	History
24	Politics
25	Art
26	Celebrities
27	Animals
28	Vehicles
29	Entertainment: Comics
30	Science: Gadgets
31	Entertainment: Japanese Anime & Manga
32	Entertainment: Cartoon & Animations

Optional Challenge Hints

• Try to see how we make the URL that we send to the API and think about how you can modify that for what you're trying to do
  • You may find it useful to make changes to get_questions so that it takes in any parameters you need for your changes
• It may be useful to use dictionaries to store any mappings you need
• You may need to change where we get questions and when we exit the loop of asking questions