Welcome to Coding Practice with Kick Start 2022!

Key Takeaways

[Music] want to participate in coding competitions but not sure how to start then join coding practice with kickstart our beginner friendly four-day practice session provides you the opportunity to try out googler created problems without the pressure of a timed round or scoreboard you'll be provided with other tools to help you get started such as starter code and several coding languages and live help from google engineers who are available to answer your questions throughout the week at the end of the four-day session we hope you'll join us live as google engineers walk you through detailed problem solutions afterwards these videos along with problem analyses and test set data will be available to you on the participant dashboard whenever you want to dive back in or refresh your memory on how to solve a particular problem this practice session is for you if you are new to competitive programming looking to boost your skills before the next kickstart round eager to learn something new or just interested in connecting with a global community coding practice with kickstart is a great way for you to get comfortable solving algorithmic and mathematical style problems develop your coding skills and apply what you've learned in school and throughout your career all right how does coding practice with kickstart work if you haven't already create a coding competitions profile and register for kickstart at g dot co slash kickstart be sure to use an active email address as we will be sending you important updates and resources throughout the week when the practice session begins you'll head to the kickstart home page and click on the participate now button to get you to the problem dashboard in each session there will be a sample problem to help you get started you will also see four problems which you can work your way through in your own time throughout the week you'll notice the scoreboard is hidden so you will be the only one able to view your results you can jump into the detailed problem statement by clicking on the title of the problem let's walk through this sample problem together to familiarize yourself with the platform okay let's begin with the problem statement you have gathered n bags of candy and you want to distribute the candy amongst m kids the ice bag contains sea of eye pieces of candy you want to make sure that every kid gets the same amount of candy and that the number of pieces of candy they receive is the greatest possible then we've got our input the first line gives the number of test cases t then for each test case we have n bags of candy m kids and then c1 c2 all the way to cn pieces of candy per bag finally for our output we need to print out the number of pieces remaining after each child receives their share according to the rules i happen to be a visual person so i like to use the sample input to walk through a specific example and think through how i'd approach the problem for the first sample input i've got seven bags of candy which adds up to 28 pieces and i've got three kids if i start handing out candy i can give each kid nine pieces and have one left over remember each kid needs to receive the same amount of candy okay so my answer here is one and i think i can avoid manually handing out each piece of candy by using the modulus operator now it's time to code in the built-in editor on the right hand side i prefer python so i used python for this problem you can write code in a variety of languages so check out the faq for all supported languages remember these problems use standard input and standard output you won't and in fact you can't read from or print to a file if you're unfamiliar with how to read in and write out in your language of choice the coding section of the faq has some samples in the most popular languages keep in mind that you can read in the input a little bit at a time you don't have to do it all at once although they sometimes say never trust the inputs for kickstart you don't need to worry about verifying whether or not the input is correct it is i'm going to make a function to process each case my function has one argument the test case number i can start by making sure i can read in the input per the problem description the first input line of a given case will consist of two integers i'll read the line in with the input function and then split it that leaves me with a list of strings i'll use the python map function to turn it into integers and finally make it a tuple with the tuple function then i'll get the candy counts list in a similar way read it in split it make each element an integer with map and finally turn it into a list for outputting the answer i'll use the print function and these new fancy formatted string literals there are lots of ways to format strings use whatever works best for you if you're using a different language than python your method of input and output will be slightly different see the coding section of the faq for more details and a few examples now that i've got input and output figured out it's time for the actual computation work in our case we need to sum up all the candy bags to get the total number of pieces of candy i do this by looping through the candy counts list and adding each count to my total then i calculate the amount of candy remaining with total candy modulo num kids that handles an individual test case so as a final step we loop through and process each case one got you here our outputs start with case number one but our loop starts with zero so i add one to the case num to make sure it gets printed out correctly and then we're ready to submit our code here you can also test your code on our servers by toggling the test run mode button before actually clicking submit judgments of your code will show up in the top left one last tip don't forget to carefully read how the output should be formatted in our case here it's the word case then pound case number colon followed by your answer remember that for each problem your code is going to be tested against a whole bunch of cases not just the sample cases you see this is to make sure that you've thought about all possible inputs and coded up a solution that can handle them all while you can assume the input will always be valid don't forget to spend a bit of time thinking outside the box around what the inputs could look like in other words think about edge cases keep in mind that the actual problems you get will likely be a bit more challenging than this one but don't worry too much the principles of solving a problem are the same now that we've gone through this example problem you're ready to get started on solving the other practice problems if you are unsure how to frame your solution don't worry we've got you covered download the starter code offered in java c plus and python at the top of the problem statement to help you get started on your solution if you need additional assistance please utilize our ask a question button on the dashboard where a googler will be able to jump in and provide support you can also post on our facebook group to connect with the community ask questions and get helpful tips from fellow coders have a great week coding and learning more about kickstart grab a friend or two practice and most importantly have fun see you at the end of the week on our on demand video page for our problem walk through stream to watch how you can go about solving the problems you just attempted now go get coding