Programming Assignment

This assignment will give you practice with while loops and pseudorandom numbers. You are going to write a program that allows the user to play a simple guessing game in which your program thinks up an integer and allows the user to make guesses until the user gets it right. For each incorrect guess you will tell the user whether the right answer is higher or lower. Your program is required to exactly reproduce the format and behavior of the log of execution at the end of this write-up, so you may want to look that over first.

At a minimum, your program should have the following static methods in addition to method main:

- a method to give instructions to the user
- a method to play one game with the user (just one game, not multiple games)
- a method to report overall results to the user

You may define more methods than this if you find it helpful, although you will find that the limitation that methods can return only one value will tend to limit how much you can decompose this problem.

You are to define a class constant for the maximum number used in the guessing game. The sample log shows the user making guesses from 1 to 100, but the choice of 100 is arbitrary. By introducing a constant for 100, you should be able to change just the value of the constant to make the program play the game with a range of 1 to 50 or a range of 1 to 250 or some other range starting with 1.

When you ask the user whether or not to play again, you should use the "next()" method of the Scanner class to read a one-word answer from the user. You should continue playing if this answer begins with the letter "y" or the letter "Y". Notice that the user is allowed to type words like "yes".

You are to look just at the first letter of the user's response and see whether it begins with a "y" or "n" (either capitalized or not) to determine whether to play again.

Assume that the user always types an integer when guessing, that the integer is always in an appropriate range and that the user gives you a one-word answer beginning with "y", "Y", "n" or "N" when asked whether to play again.

You will notice at the end of the log that you are to report various statistics about the series of games played by the user. You are to report the total number of games played, the total number of guesses made (all games included), the average number of guesses per game and the maximum number of guesses used in any single game.

Here are a few helpful hints to keep in mind.

- This program needs to generate pseudorandom numbers. This is described in section 5.2.3 of the book.

- To deal with the yes/no response from the user, you might want to use some of the String class methods described in section 3.5.1 and 4.5 of the book. You will want to use the next() method of the Scanner class to read a word from the console.

- Because this program uses pseudorandom numbers, you won't be able to recreate this exact log. The key requirement is that you reproduce the format of this log and that your calculations for overall statistics are correct for your log.

- It's a good idea to change the value of your class constant and run the program to make sure that everything works right with the new value of the constant. For example, turn it into a guessing game for numbers between 1 and 5.

This program is more difficult than most to decompose into methods, so you may end up having methods that are longer than 15 lines. You can also include more code in your main method than I allowed in the last program. In particular, you are required to have a while loop in main that plays multiple games and prompts the user for whether or not to play another game. You shouldn't have all of the code in main because you are required to have the methods described at the beginning of this write-up.