Shuffling arrays in NumPy - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Shuffling Arrays with NumPy

📖 Scenario: You are working with a list of student IDs for a class. You want to randomly shuffle the order of these IDs to assign presentation slots fairly.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to shuffle a NumPy array to randomize the order of elements.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a NumPy array with specific student IDs

Set a random seed for reproducibility

Shuffle the array using NumPy

Print the shuffled array

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Randomly shuffling data is useful in experiments, games, and fair assignments like presentations or seating.

💼 Career

Data scientists often shuffle data to prepare for training machine learning models or to randomize samples.

1

Create the NumPy array

Import NumPy as np and create a NumPy array called student_ids with these exact values: 101, 102, 103, 104, 105.

NumPy

# Import numpy as np and create the array student_ids
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use np.array() to create the array with the given numbers.

2

Set the random seed

Set the random seed to 42 using np.random.seed(42) to make the shuffle results reproducible.

NumPy

import numpy as np
student_ids = np.array([101, 102, 103, 104, 105])
# Set the random seed to 42
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use np.random.seed(42) before shuffling to get the same random order every time.

3

Shuffle the array

Use np.random.shuffle(student_ids) to shuffle the student_ids array in place.

NumPy

import numpy as np
student_ids = np.array([101, 102, 103, 104, 105])
np.random.seed(42)
# Shuffle the student_ids array
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call np.random.shuffle() with the array you want to shuffle.

4

Print the shuffled array

Print the student_ids array to see the shuffled order.

NumPy

import numpy as np
student_ids = np.array([101, 102, 103, 104, 105])
np.random.seed(42)
np.random.shuffle(student_ids)
# Print the shuffled student_ids array
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(student_ids) to display the shuffled array.