It’s week 3 of the Rice University Coursera Python class, and we’re creating a stopwatch game, the object of which is to stop the stopwatch on an even second. I finished the project, and much to my chagrin realized as I was programming it that I had given bad feedback to the projects I had reviewed the prior week.

To my novice eye, the projects had included some unnecessary elements, from extra variables, to assignment via functions or event handlers instead of a more direct route. Based on the third project, I think my suggestions for ‘improvement’ were actually suggestions to make it worse. In the Stopwatch project, it became clear to me that assigning ‘dummy’-type variables and using event handlers to assign can give you more flexibility in making changes. It keeps the various functions more separate, and so more easily testable as well.

If you were one of my unlucky classmates that received that feedback, please ignore the suggestion and accept my sincere apologies.

By the way, if you are looking for help on this project, let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best.