💻 Activity: Accessing Items in a List

Consider a Circuit with Resistors in Parallel

Let’s use a circuit with 9 volts of energy and three different resistors in parallel.

Let’s use nested lists to store information about the circuit.

# create each list individually before nesting
r1 = ...
r2 = ...
r3 = ...

# make a nested list of the resistors in the circuit
circuitParallel = [r1, r2, r3]

Ohm’s Law is still applicable but to each of the parallel loops.

Ohm’s Law shows that the voltage (E) is equal to current (I) multiplied by resistance (R).

\(E = IR\)

Apply Ohm’s Law to determine the current through each resistor.

# voltage through the circuit
E = 9

# current through first resistor
...

# current through the second resistor
...

# current through the third resistor
...

For a parallel circuit, the total current is the sum of the current across all of the resistors.

In the next cell, sum the current across the resistors using a for loop to access the items in circuitParallel.

# sum the current across the resistors
...
for ... in ...: 
    ...

print(totalCurrent)

Now, you can confidently use nested lists and can access each item in a list using a for loop.