Python introduction

Whenever people learn a new programming language they tend to start by learning how to print Hello World. So that's what we're going to do now. Type out this code and run it.

print("Hello world")

Challenge

Now that you can print Hello World, change it to say Hello {your name here} (be sure to replace {your_name_here} with your name).

Variables are how we give names to data.

# Set my variable to "world" (notice the quotes ")
my_variable = "world"
# Print Hello {my_variable}
print("Hello " + my_variable)

There's quite a lot going on here so let's break it down.

See those lines that start with #? Anything after that python ignores. This is really useful for making comments about our code since we can type anything we want there.

Next we have the quotation marks around world. This is because " says that there is a string inside. A string is just a fancy way of saying text.

In this example we called our variable my_variable, but we could have called it anything. As long as the variable starts with a letter or character and has no spaces its name will work.

Type out this example and see what happens.

Challenge

Create a variable called my_name and like above make a print statement to say Hello {my_name}.

So far we have to manually put our name into the code.

Let's say that you want to give this program to your friends, right now you would have to manually change the name each time. What about if we could ask for their name when they run the program?

name = input("What is your name?")
print("Hello " + name)