Lost the "Recommended" exercise indicator

I am working through the Python track. When I click on “Exercises” I see many exercises labelled as “Available”. I also used to see one exercise labeled as “Recommended” on the top left all the time, and always selecting the recommended exercise seemed to be just the right difficulty to keep moving along.

One day, I tried a different “Available” exercise and it was far too difficult, so I decided to leave it alone for the time being. But now when I go look at my list of “Available” exercises, the one I gave up on is at the top left and labeled as “In Progress”, and I no longer have a “Recommended” exercise there. This leaves me randomly choosing among the dozens of other exercises that are available, and some of them are still above my head.

The “Recommended” function was very helpful. Is there any way to manually get the system to tell me again which exercise I should try next? Or is there a way to erase all progress in a certain exercise so that it no longer displays as “In Progress” and bumps itself up to the top of the exercise list? I believe this would leave room for the “Recommended” exercise to appear at the top again.

Hi!

I am very sad to hear that, could you tell me the name of the exercise and I will make a note about looking over to perhaps increase the difficulty?

Although yes when you have an exercise in progress then will no other exercises be flagged as “recommended”. Lucky for you so should the python exercise map scale decently well with the easiest in the first rows and the hardest on the last.

Although as far as am I aware the only way to get back the “recommended” tag is to finish the exercise in progress.

The exercise is “Space Age”.

The operations needed to return the correct answers are very simple for this one, so in one sense it is “easy”. However, the format of the code for this one is entirely different. Instead of just a function, this one starts with a “class”, and the first function is something with init and self… I have not learned any of this yet so I literally can’t even begin working on this.

If finishing this exercise is the only way to get “recommended” back then I will probably end up cheating and copying a community answer so I can get rid of this exercise from my list.

Space Age in Python isn’t very hard … aside from requiring the ability to write a class. Classes are worth learning, especially since everything in Python is an object.

It might be worth looking up a Python class tutorial.

The stub gives you most the boilerplate code you need. The things you need to know at a very high level about a class are

  • the syntax to define them
  • how to define methods (one of which is given to you)
  • the fact that (most) methods take a self as the first argument, which is a reference to the object and can be used to store or recall saved values
  • the fact that the __init__ is called automatically when the class is created.

If you have any trouble with it, I’m happy to help out. You can also submit a solution for mentoring via the CLI if you need help, even if the tests don’t pass.

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