You're following a recipe for potato soup. It says "wash and peel five potatoes." But you only know how to wash and peel one potato. So you wash and peel one potato, then another, then another, until you've done it to five potatoes. That's a for loop: "for each of five potatoes, wash the potato, then peel it." More on reddit.com

Loops allow you to repeat a block of code over and over again. There are two main types of loops in Python - for loops and while loops. For loops are used when you know how many times you want to repeat the code. # This will print the numbers 0 to 4 for i in range(5): print(i) The range(5) part creates numbers from 0 to 4. The for loop will go through each of those numbers, storing them in the variable i, and print them out. While loops are used when you don't know exactly how many times you need to repeat the code. You keep looping as long as some condition is true. # This will print numbers as long as x is less than 5 x = 0 while x < 5: print(x) x = x + 1 This starts x at 0, then keeps looping as long as x is less than 5. Each time, it prints x and then adds 1 to x. Once x reaches 5, the loop stops. More on reddit.com

What's the difficulty exactly? The basic idea is you've got a bucket of items, and you want to take each one one at a time and do something with it, until you've gone through all the items. Think of it like "for each item in bucket", where the "each" is silent/invisible. Example: bucket = [1, 2, 3] for item in bucket: print(item) Sometimes you don't care about the actual items in the bucket; you just want to use them as a counter to make the loop run X number of times. Then it's common to use range() as a convenient way to make a bucket of a given size. for item in range(3): print('Huzzah!') The bucket can be anything that's an "iterable". So, lists, tuples, strings, dictionaries, generators, etc. If an item drawn from the bucket has multiple parts, you can use "tuple unpacking" to reference them individually. bucket = ['a', 'b', 'c'] for index, value in enumerate(bucket): print(index, value) More on reddit.com

range() generates numbers. If you only pass 1 argument range(5) it will start from 0 and keep going up, and stop before hitting 5. I know sounds strange but that's how it works. So range(5) gives you 0 1 2 3 4 If you pass 2 arguments, range(1,5), same as above except this time it starts from your first argument, 1. So you get 1 2 3 4 The 3rd argument is how each steps increases. By default it's 1. Let's pass a 2 and see what happens? range(1, 10, 2) --> 1 3 5 7 9. Starts from 1, goes up 2 each time, stops before 10. More on reddit.com