Example essays
These examples illustrate different ways of structuring essays and different writing styles.
For some essays, there’s a template that highlights the essay’s structure and the purpose of each section. These templates help you start writing your own essay. Clicking on a button below will open a read-only version of the essay or template.
To get an editable version of a template to start writing your own essay, right-click on a download button. From the pop-up menu, choose ‘Save file as…’ (or similar) to save the template in a folder of your choice.
Deepnote
You don’t need to download anything because you will have the essay templates and examples once you copied our essay project, as explained in Getting started (Deepnote).
Colab
You don’t need to download any template because you can open them directly, as explained in Getting started (Colab).
Sum of 1 to n
This is a short and simple essay, suitable for those on introductory programming courses. The essay shows two ways of calculating 1 + 2 + … + n and compares their run-times. The essay follows a simple structure, in which each approach is outlined, implemented and tested before moving on to the next one.
Essay Template Template (download)
Jewels and Stones
This is a longer essay, for those on data structures and algorithms courses. The problem is to count how many characters of a string occur in another string. The essay solves the problem in three ways, with linear search, a set, and a bag/multiset. The complexity of the three algorithms is analysed and compared to their run-time.
This essay follows a slightly different structure, in which each approach is outlined and its complexity analysed, before deciding which approaches are worth implementing.
Essay Template Template (download)
Two Sum (two approaches)
This classic problem asks to find two numbers in a list that add up exactly to a given number. This essay solves the problem in two ways, with brute-force search (nested loops) and a map (Python dictionary).
Two Sum (three approaches)
This is an extended version of the previous essay. It adds a third approach, that sorts the list of numbers.