🔒 A little push

[left roost]

Please write a program which asks for the number of students on a course and the desired group size. The program will then print out the number of groups formed from the students on the course. If the division is not even, one of the groups may have fewer members than specified.
This is a question of mooc 2026 program in the part where i am at **we have not done if/else conditional statements **which i know but dont want to use as question says

• "If you can't get your code working as expected, it is absolutely okay to move on and come back to this exercise later. The topic of the next section is conditional statements. This exercise can also be solved using a conditional construction."*

Anyways,

n2 = int(input("Desired group size? "))
grps = n1//n2+ n1%n2
print(f"Number of groups formed: {grps}")```
This is as far as i was able to think i also tried n1//n2+ n1%n2/n1%n2 but the problem here is it will be 0/0 error whenn modulo is zero and i am blank ahead

[hardy bough]

Hey @left roost!

Please edit your message to use a code block

Add a py after the three backticks.

```py
print('Hello, world!')
```

This will result in the following:

print('Hello, world!')```

@left roost

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[obtuse tree]

it's lacking context. Are you allowed to use the math module?

[left roost]

no

its like part 1 of the course and we have not had bolean logic or if/else

[obtuse tree]

!e ```py
n1 = 19

for n2 in range(1, 6):
print(n1, n2, -((-n1)//n2))

[hardy bough]

:white_check_mark: Your 3.14 eval job has completed with return code 0.

001 | 19 1 19
002 | 19 2 10
003 | 19 3 7
004 | 19 4 5
005 | 19 5 4

[obtuse tree]

this is a sneaky way to do "ceildiv"

[left roost]

can you tell me whats that,sorry i am new to coding in general

[obtuse tree]

because flooring with negative numbers makes the absolute value larger

[obtuse tree]

// is floordiv

it divides then rounds towards negative infinity

[left roost]

yeah i know that

[obtuse tree]

the ceiling is the opposite of the floor

[left roost]

ah but can we make this without using range as its even more advanced than conditional statements

[obtuse tree]

I didn't use range to solve your problem

I used range to show the answer for various n2

-((-n1)//n2) this is the solution

[left roost]

oh i dont know what that does so i thought it was required thanks

[obtuse tree]

negating, floordiv-ing, then negating again

therefore getting the opposite effect of flooring

[left roost]

is this like a common way or logic?

[obtuse tree]

I'm confused by your question

[left roost]

like do we usually use something like this when we hae to round up or its something i have to develop the thought process for like in maths there are some standard questions that you should know to do them?

[obtuse tree]

no we would use math.ceil

[coarse isle]

I think that's more of a math thing than a logic thing. I've never had to do anything like that before

[obtuse tree]

this is for rounding up and dividing, at the same time, as a little trick

because you can't use anything else in your question

[left roost]

thanks for the quick response and help

[hardy bough]

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