Kindergarten Garden

Instructions

Your task is to, given a diagram, determine which plants each child in the kindergarten class is responsible for.

There are 12 children in the class:

• Alice, Bob, Charlie, David, Eve, Fred, Ginny, Harriet, Ileana, Joseph, Kincaid, and Larry.

Four different types of seeds are planted:

Each child gets four cups, two on each row:

[window][window][window]
........................ # each dot represents a cup
........................

Their teacher assigns cups to the children alphabetically by their names, which means that Alice comes first and Larry comes last.

Here is an example diagram representing Alice's plants:

[window][window][window]
VR......................
RG......................

In the first row, nearest the windows, she has a violet and a radish. In the second row she has a radish and some grass.

Your program will be given the plants from left-to-right starting with the row nearest the windows. From this, it should be able to determine which plants belong to each student.

For example, if it's told that the garden looks like so:

[window][window][window]
VRCGVVRVCGGCCGVRGCVCGCGV
VRCCCGCRRGVCGCRVVCVGCGCV

Then if asked for Alice's plants, it should provide:

• Violets, radishes, violets, radishes

While asking for Bob's plants would yield:

• Clover, grass, clover, clover

Python Implementation

The tests for this exercise expect your program to be implemented as a Garden class in Python. If you are unfamiliar with classes in Python, classes from the Python docs is a good place to start.

Your class should implement a method called plants, which takes a student's name as an argument and returns the list of plant names belonging to that student.

Constructors

Creating the example garden

[window][window][window]
VRCGVVRVCGGCCGVRGCVCGCGV
VRCCCGCRRGVCGCRVVCVGCGCV

would, in the tests, be represented as Garden("VRCGVVRVCGGCCGVRGCVCGCGV\nVRCCCGCRRGVCGCRVVCVGCGCV").

To make this representation work, your class will need to implement an __init__() method. If you're not familiar with __init__() or constructors, class and instance objects from the Python docs gives a more detailed explanation.

Default Parameters

In some tests, a list of students is passed as an argument to __init__(). This should override the twelve student roster provided in the problem statement. Both of these statements need to work with your __init__() method:

# Make a garden based on the default 12-student roster.
Garden("VRCGVVRVCGGCCGVRGCVCGCGV\nVRCCCGCRRGVCGCRVVCVGCGCV") 

# Make a garden based on a 2-student roster.
Garden("VRCC\nVCGG", students=["Valorie", "Raven"]) 

One approach is to make the student list a default argument; the Python docs describe default parameters in depth while explaining function definitions.

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Source

Exercise by the JumpstartLab team for students at The Turing School of Software and Design.