Introduction

Resources

• Slides

So far, we’ve worked with many different programming structures, including functions, if statements, loops, and more. However, so far we’ve been a bit limited in how much data we can easily store. This is because a traditional variable can only store one value at a time!

If we want to store lots of data, it would be much easier if we had a way to store it in a structured way so that we can access it using a single variable name and possibly some other identifier.

Thankfully, Python includes a great way to do this using various collection data types. A collection is a data structure that allows us to store multiple data items in a single variable, and each item is identified in some way using either an index or a key.

In this lab, we’ll explore one collection type in Python, which is the list. Let’s get started!