OK, that took me seven hours, over four work sessions/days. Most of that was debugging-- some very educational, as I got experience in several things that produce quirky/mysterious errors rather than simple syntax errors. Some errors produced by programming subtleties I "should know" (are lists local variables?), some produced by IDLE quirks (coughs on too many ''' comments), some by what seem to be errors in the materials provided to me (missing library import, resulting in undefined methods). But I did solve them all, step by step, and get the code working. Someday I will be better at understanding at a glance what the code someone hands to me is trying to say/do. But I am good at step by step troubleshooting, even when not having all the info/background.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-189-a-gentle-introduction-to-programming-using-python-january-iap-2011/assignments/MIT6_189IAP11_project2.pdf
