Introduction.

It is commonly known that the worst form of torture is performing monotonous tasks ad nauseam. So I constructed this simple game I can give to my students when they misbehave.

Task.

The goal was to make a problem that could take in two numbers, and construct n distinct multiplication problems where the user is asked to answer what x * y is.

Challenge.

Where I struggled was with the part in cursive. How do I write a clear and readable code that produces distinct multiplication problems? I tried to do it with creating a sample of distinct numbers X, and then choose y such that y ≤ x where x is a member of X. Unsure if this is the best idea.

The code and some comments

1. I choose to do import random instead of importing the modules as it is a bit clearer where the modules comes from
2. As above, choose to include a short ___docstring___ more out of habit than necessity I guess..
3. As mentioned above, do not really like my method for forcing the questions to be distinct.
4. Tried to comply with pep8 for the long strings, looks a bit strange.

Here is the code

import random

QUESTIONS = 5
MIN_VAL = 2
MAX_VAL = 12


def arithmetic_game(val_1=MIN_VAL,
                    val_2=MAX_VAL,
                    num_of_problem=QUESTIONS):
    """ Ask the user a series of arithmetic questions
    and returns the number of correct answers.

    Args: val_1 (int): Defines the range of multiplication
    Args: val_2 (int): Defines the range of multiplication
    Args: number_of_problems (int): Defines the number of questions

    Return: correct_answers (int): number of correct math questions answered"""

    correct_answers = 0

    num_lst = random.sample(
            range(min(val_1, val_2), max(val_2, val_2)+1),
            num_of_problem)

    for num_1 in num_lst:
        num_2 = random.randint(2, num_1)
        print('\nWhat is {:d} times {:d}?'
              ''.format(num_1, num_2))
        answer = num_1*num_2

        try:
            if int(input()) == answer:
                print('Yes, the answer is {:d}'
                      ''.format(answer))
                correct_answers += 1
            else:
                print('No, the correct answer was {:d}'
                      ''.format(answer))
        except NameError:
            raise ValueError('I am sorry, you have'
                             'to write in a valid integer')

    return correct_answers


if __name__ == "__main__":

    correct_answers = arithmetic_game()
    print('\nYou got {:d} out of {:d} answers correct'
          ''.format(correct_answers, QUESTIONS))