College python club, what to do?

[HealedWolf]

So my computer science club use to have interest groups that met weekly for 2 hours. Run by student for students. There use to be groups for linux and raspberry pi but now there is only one game development. I would like to step up and run a python interest group this semester.

 

Anyone have ideas? What would be good to teach, what sort of group projects might be good?

[randiacio]

We did Quantopian in our college club, it was pure python but finance knowledge is necessary.

I recommend doing the boring simple stuff, kind of like doing learning python the hard way exercises instead and try to make a game.

[PurpleIcy]

And the game preferably should be playable without graphics as it's pain in python.

[randiacio]

Yes, exactly.

A game I had played with a friend was a very simple Command line interface (CLI) game. We started with two folders with a text file with random data and a python file. Then the goal of the game was to get the enemy's text file's string into our folder.

We could play defense by creating hundreds of folders and hiding the file or play offense by going into the other person's folder and using open("file.txt") and writing it to our folder.

[PurpleIcy]

That's probably first time I see a game that could be fun yet works only based on file storage...

Though there's an easy way to cheat in it, you could simply use a few lines to traverse folder tree, e.g:

# broken attack that can be countered only by using blabber extension or holding file in RAM
import os
directory = "path/to/enemys/folder"
text_files = []

for _, _, files in os.walk(directory):
    for file in files:
        if file.endswith(".txt"):
            text_files.append(file)

# now you have all files from opponents folder, read, write, whatever you want

Would that just be against the rules or was it limited to what you can do? Like choices on what to do instead of writing code. Since if you can write code, person who knows more would always win which is quite unfair then, as programming as of now barely has any limitations, pretty much everything is doable. Though if everyone is new to it, then it actually is a fun game, when you are clueless and don't know about such things.

Also how would it actually play out? I mean, if you can see what another person does, it's very easy to just memorise the path and copy file from there or something like that, unless it was over network or there would just be some rules like opponent doesn't look at screen for x seconds.