Functions for Dinner

Good job choosing a vacation location!

For this activity, let's pretend you're visiting the Art Institute of Chicago with three friends. It is the first night and after a long day of travel, you want to pick a restaurant. You have a long list of recommended restaurants and their locations. Each restaurant point has a type attribute that specifies the type of food served and a location attribute that records where is it located.

You start listing off food options to your friends:

"How about we eat sushi?" you ask.

"Hmm... no, I don't like sushi," your friend responds.

"And I don't like burgers," another chimes in.

"I'm tired and don't want to walk more than 1 mile to the restaurant!" your last friend says.

With these conditions, let's try writing a function pick_restaurant that will narrow down your list of restaurants to ones that will work for all of your friends. Feel free to add in your own restrictions as well!

We included maps that allow you to see how the functions you write affect restaurant options around the Art Institute of Chicago. Remember that your functions could be applied to any location, we are just using the Art Institute of Chicago as an example.

The code that you saw in the last exercise is actually called pseudocode. It is like writing an outline of an essay rather than writing the essay itself. It communicates what you want your code to do rather than writing actual code. It is useful for planning and learning new concepts!

Let's briefly review the pseudocode for our function from the Vacation Locations activity and try to relate it to the pseudocode that you are going to write.

Note how the pick_vacation has two smaller blocks of code within it: choose_by_catagory and choose_by_distance. These blocks narrow down the possible locations you can visit so that only ones that fit your criteria show up on the map!

Reflection 1

What blocks of code do you think pick_restaurant needs? What is the purpose of each of the blocks?

Task 1

Let's write one of the code blocks now! This block of code will be used to eliminate any restaurants that have food types you don't like.

Write this code block as a function. Remember that all functions have the following structure:

• A descriptive name and inputs
• General code that uses the inputs
• Outputs that change depending on the inputs

Let's name this function eliminate_by_type. This function will allow you to avoid any restaurant types that you, or your friends, don't like. Give your input a general name and at the end of this activity, we will discuss how you can use your friends' inputs with your function.

Here are two hints before you begin.

• You can use a list of values as an input to a function! You can then check if items are within this list as the comparison within a conditional statement.
• The NOT keyword negates comparisons within a conditional statement.

Task 2

Let's now write a function that we will call choose_by_distance. One of your friends does not want to travel more than a mile to eat. Write a function that allows them to specify how far they are willing to travel to a restaurant.

Task 3

It is now time to combine the code that you just wrote into one function: pick_restaurant! This will let you quickly narrow down the possible restaurants with just two inputs. Try to combine the code using just one loop!

Reflection 2

How would you use this function? What inputs would you use to use this function to find restaurants that your friends would be okay eating at? Remember that your friends don't want sushi or burgers and they don't want to travel more than 1 mile.

Let's review what we learned:

• We can use lists as inputs to functions.
• We can use the NOT keyword within conditional statements.
• We reviewed functions and practiced writing functions with both loops and conditional statements for a new situation!

Great job practicing your new skills!