The Environment & Data Streams

Phase 1: The Professional Workspace

In international competitions, speed and organization are everything. We use Carnets because it uses Jupyter Notebooks (.ipynb). Unlike a normal text file, a notebook allows us to run “Cells” of code one by one. This is how NASA engineers and Data Scientists work.

The Story of the Blueprint Imagine building a skyscraper. You don’t just start laying bricks. You need a blueprint where you can test small parts of the building first. Carnets is our blueprint. We test our logic in small “cells” before building the whole “tower.”

Phase 2: Variables & The Memory Vaults

Computers have “RAM” (Random Access Memory). Think of RAM as a giant wall of post-it notes. When we create a variable like player_score = 10, we are telling the iPad to find a specific spot on that wall, label it “player_score,” and stick the number 10 on it.

Competitive Tip: In competitions, choosing the wrong data type can make your program slow or crash. We always aim for “Memory Efficiency.”

age = 11
pi = 3.14159

print(type(name))
print(type(age))
print(type(pi))

Ran into an error? To avoid a NameError which might frustrate a student in their first 20 minutes, make sure the lab instructions tell them to include name = "your name goes here" at the top of that cell.

Phase 3: Input and Output (I/O)

Every algorithm follows a simple rule: Input → Processing → Output.

We use input() to take data from the outside world and print() to show our results. In a competition, your code must read thousands of inputs and print the exact answer in milliseconds.

year_input = input("Enter your birth year: ")

year = int(year_input) 

# We must convert text to a number!

current_age = 2026 - year

print("You are", current_age, "years old.")

🚀 Mission Brief: Operation Variable Swap

Mission Objective: Your commander has given you two secret codes stored in variables A and B. You must swap them so that A holds B‘s value, and B holds A‘s value.

The Catch: In high-level competitions, we try to use as little memory as possible. Can you do it without creating a third variable? (This is a famous logic puzzle!)

The Hard Way (The Temporary Variable): Think of two cups: one with Blue juice (A) and one with Red juice (B). To swap them, you usually need a third empty cup (Temp).

💪 Level 1: The Arithmetic Brain-Teaser

Can you swap a = 5 and b = 10 using only addition and subtraction? You are NOT allowed to create a third variable or use Python “tricks.”

Hint: Think of it like a scale. If you add them together first, can you subtract one to get the other?

Level 2: The Competitive Challenge: Can you do it without the third cup? In Python, there is a special “Tuple Unpacking” trick that is very fast in competitions.

a, b = b, a

Lab Tasks:

1. Open Carnets and create a notebook named Session_1_Logic.ipynb.
2. Create code_a = 5 and code_b = 10.
3. Write the logic to swap them.
4. Use print() to prove the swap worked.

code_a = 5
code_b = 10

# your logic goes here...

print("Code A is now:", code_a)
print("Code B is now:", code_b)

Summary & Recap

• The Tools: We configured Carnets and learned how to manage .ipynb files.
• Memory: We learned that variables are labeled boxes in the computer’s RAM.
• I/O: We practiced the Input-Process-Output flow.
• Logic: We solved our first “Optimization” problem by swapping data.