Lesson 5.2: Hangman Pt. 1

Today’s Goals

• Start building Hangman in Python
• Practice strings, lists, and loops
• Think about how to represent a word with blanks

Warm-Up Question

• How would you hide the word PYTHON so the player only sees blanks?
• Call on a student to explain their idea.

Representing the Word

• We need to store the word as a string
• We’ll create a list of blanks (_) to display progress

Example Setup

word = "python"
blanks = ["_"] * len(word)
print(" ".join(blanks))

Class Practice

• Run the example above
• How many underscores do you see?
• What happens if you change the word?

Checking a Guess

word = "python"
blanks = ["_"] * len(word)
guess = input("Guess a letter: ")

for i in range(len(word)):
    if word[i] == guess:
        blanks[i] = guess

print(" ".join(blanks))

Discussion

• How does the loop check each letter?
• What happens if the letter appears more than once?

Student Challenge

• Add a loop so the player can keep guessing until all letters are found
• Print the word when the player wins

Wrap-Up

• Hangman uses: strings, lists, loops, and conditionals
• Next time: we’ll add error handling and make the game harder