Simple, tricky and interesting questions and exercises for PHP Beginners

Question

I'm giving a small PHP course over the next weekend and i would like to present a few questions and exercises for my students, so they can practice with an objective, a fun one. I already presented the basics for them, now it's time for some action. Any ideas, guys?

Answer 1

For example u can give them a simple for loop statement and ask them to implement it with while statement or vise versa. and do this for other statements like switch case and if.

Answer 2

Finding ways to implement simple algorithms always provides great practice. If you think they're ready for higher level data structures (linked lists, graphs, etc.) then you could give them a Depth-First Search problem. If they're not at that level yet, try working with arrays and for/while loops. You can iterate lots of functions over entire arrays very easily. For example, average the values of an array, sum the values, or create a new array of N-1 elements (where the first array had N elements), each of which is the difference of element N and element N+1 in the original array.

If you want to try any of the examples into the real world, try grade calculation algorithms (given a list of grades, find the GPA) or shopping carts (you bought 1 of item X, 3 of item Y, 2 of item Z... total price?)

You can also make it a bit for complicated by having weighted grades (a B in a 3 hours class and an A in a 1 hour class = a GPA of 3.25)

I would also recommend doing a little bit of work with either databases or files input/output. The ability to save the results of your work and recall them later will GREATLY extend their understanding of complex larger systems like websites.

If you think it's not too complicated (I don't know the level of the students), one assignment I had in a class a couple of years ago (which we did in PERL) could be modified. It involved the following text document:

1           | Billy | Bob   | Kentucky   | Yale
     2 | Sally |     Sue|    Virginia  | Harvard
...

We were told to assume the pattern id | first_name | last_name | state | university, however there could be a variable amount of white-space. There were also some malformated entries, such as:

...
    7  | Joe |  3   |         Ohio  |   MIT
...

Clearly 3 isn't a last name. We were told to use regular expressions to verify that the ID was an integer less than 10000, the first and last names consisted only of letters, the state had to start with a capital letter and be followed by some number of lower-case letters, and the university had to consist only of letters. If there were any errors we had to say what the error was and what line of the file it was on. (For example: "Error on line 7: 3 is an invalid last name. Should be only letters")

After this we entered a loop (our program was interactive and ran from shell) where they could enter 1 for id, 2 for first name, 3 for last name, etc. They entered 0 to quit. Whatever they put in, they could then type a string to search for and it would find a student who matched that criteria and display their information. Instead of an interactive loop, if you're teaching PHP for use on a web server, maybe allow them to submit a form and check the $_POST information.

Answer 3

Arrays are a stumbling point for most beginners I know. I'd personally run them through single-and multi-dimensional array looping and stepping. With MVC frameworks becoming so prevalent, the foreach loop and array functions become vital to programming success.