Extending parent behavior in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Extending Parent Behavior

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are creating a simple system to manage different types of employees in a company. Each employee has a name and a method to describe their work. You want to create a special type of employee called a Manager who does everything a normal employee does but also manages a team.

🎯 Goal: You will build two classes: Employee and Manager. The Manager class will extend the Employee class and add extra behavior by extending the parent method.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a class called Employee with an __init__ method that takes name as a parameter.

Add a method called work in Employee that returns the string "Employee {name} is working".

Create a class called Manager that inherits from Employee.

Override the work method in Manager to extend the behavior of Employee.work by adding " and managing the team" to the returned string.

Create an instance of Manager with the name "Alice" and print the result of calling its work method.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Extending parent behavior is common when you want to add or change features in a new type of object without rewriting existing code. For example, managers have all employee features plus extra responsibilities.

💼 Career

Understanding inheritance and method overriding is essential for writing clean, reusable code in many programming jobs, especially in software development and object-oriented design.

1

Create the Employee class

Create a class called Employee with an __init__ method that takes a parameter name and stores it in self.name. Also, add a method called work that returns the string f"Employee {self.name} is working".

Python

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to use self.name = name inside the __init__ method to save the name.

2

Create the Manager class inheriting Employee

Create a class called Manager that inherits from Employee. Do not add any methods yet.

Python

class Employee:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
    
    def work(self):
        return f"Employee {self.name} is working"

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use parentheses to inherit: class Manager(Employee):

3

Override the work method in Manager

In the Manager class, override the work method. Inside it, call the parent class work method using super().work() and add the string " and managing the team" to the result. Return the combined string.

Python

class Employee:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
    
    def work(self):
        return f"Employee {self.name} is working"

class Manager(Employee):
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use super().work() to get the parent method's result.

4

Create Manager instance and print work result

Create an instance of Manager called manager with the name "Alice". Then print the result of calling manager.work().

Python

class Employee:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
    
    def work(self):
        return f"Employee {self.name} is working"

class Manager(Employee):
    def work(self):
        parent_work = super().work()
        return parent_work + " and managing the team"

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Create the instance with Manager("Alice") and print manager.work().