A Trivia Quiz

The Beginning: Tkinter Library

I started learning Python on my own during the fall semester at Waterloo. While I had a grasp on the fundamentals, I was still a ways off from building actual user-interactive applications, and it was evident to me that there was a conspicuous gap between my skillset and the programs I came across in the real world. This was what led me to learn about what GUI applications were during the building process, and how I could integrate these concepts into Python code. I chose to employ Tkinter and explored its capabilities such as creating interactive buttons and windows.

Using an Excel Spreadsheet and Pandas Library

I also quickly realized that I didn't want to manually embed every question into my code, and wanted more flexibility with how the questions were generated, so I learned how to create and format an Excel spreadsheet to store all the questions in a way that was accessible for Python, which was possible after learning about the pandas library and the dataframe structure. However, a problem that arose was that my Python file and the Excel spreadsheet were stored in a separate folder on my Desktop instead of in my computer's main directory, and therefore, they were "inaccessible." The notion of computer directories was also something new that I had to contend with, and I eventually solved this problem by using the Pathlib library in my Python code to redirect the main-directory to the parent folder every time the program is run, so that the Python file and the excel question bank would share the same directory and become accessible.

Additional Adjustments

After having a working program, I wanted to challenge myself further and decided I wanted to branch out from just a single set of geographical questions; I wanted add various selectable categories with their designated set of questions. I did so by adding another column on the Excel spreadsheet, which would provide the category of each question. Then by extracting every unique element in the 'Category' column into a list, I would have my categories to display. After a category is selected, the set of questions generated would be the employment of the to_dict method along with the orient='records' option in pandas, which would convert each row of the dataframe into a list of dictionaries (key=column name and value=value in the row). Then like before, the imported random library's shuffle function would shuffle each object in this list to display.

I also remembered how previous quizzes I'd taken also included prompts (i.e ‘would you like to retake the quiz?’ or ‘are you sure you would like to exit?') and feedback (‘correct’, ‘incorrect’, Your score is...’) in consideration of the user's preferences, so I also proceeded to create functions that would perform those actions.

Then I tried to import a background using the built in capabilities in the Tkinter, but I learned that Tkinter itself does not support a background image property, so I researched and learned about the canvas widget in Tkinter and the Image/ImageTk features in the Pillow library. These allowed more extensive customizations that did the job. Furthermore, I learned about how ttk widgets often allowed a more consistent interface than tk widgets, which inspired me to also add hover effects to the buttons by importing ttk as well. This project not only taught me so many previously foreign concepts and led me into a world with so much more possibility, but I also had to practice my ability to troubleshoot, as there were many times when the program functioned erratically and I had to figure out what was wrong with the code or logic. As a first project, it was quite challenging for me to work my way around, but now that it's over, I feel I've grown and gained a remarkable amount of knowledge in this short span of time. It has made me quite eager to tackle new challenges as learning opportunities.