When you wrote
for number in students:
your intention was, “run this block of code students
times, where students
is the value I just entered.” But in Python, the thing you pass to a for
statement needs to be some kind of iterable object. In this case, what you want is just a range
statement. This will generate a list of numbers, and iterating through these will allow your for
loop to execute the right number of times:
for number in range(students):
# do stuff
Under the hood, the range
just generates a list of sequential numbers:
>>> range(5)
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
In your case, it doesn’t really matter what the numbers are; the following two for
statements would do the same thing:
for number in range(5):
for number in [1, 3, 97, 4, -32768]:
But using the range
version is considered more idiomatic and is more convenient if you need to alter some kind of list in your loop (which is probably what you’re going to need to do later).