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Random Choice from Lists

🟨🐍 Technique Card: Getting a Random Choice from a List in Python (practical)

🚀 What You’ll Learn

How to randomly pick an item from a list in Python — great for games, name pickers, and creative projects.

🧠 Key Ideas

  • Lists hold multiple values.
  • The random module helps Python make random choices.
  • random.choice() picks one item from a list at random.

📝 Example Code

import random  # bring in the random module

band_names = ["The Zappers", "Neon Noodles", "Pixel Crunch", "Echo Shadows"]
random_name = random.choice(band_names)

print(f"Your band name is: {random_name}")

🧩 You can change the list to anything you like — favourite foods, pet names, colours, spells…

💡 Top Tips

  • Don’t forget to use import random at the top of your code.
  • Your list can include strings, numbers, or even other lists!
  • This works with lists of any length — even just two options.

🔧 Try It Yourself

Change the list in the code to something fun, like:

["Dragon", "Wizard", "Elf", "Goblin"]

Or mix things up with silly food combos:

["Choco-pizza", "Cheese soup", "Banana tacos", "Ice cream stew"]

🧪 Experiment More

  • Try running the code several times. What changes? Why?
  • Add more items to the list.
  • Can you use random.choice() to randomly choose something else in your projects?

🐟 Go Deeper

Watch the video