If you’re a Cody player, you’re familiar with the What Now? problem. That is, you’ve got a few minutes to play around with Cody, but you’re not sure what to tackle next. We’ll always offer you the default display: problems you haven’t solved sorted by which ones have the most solvers. It’s a pretty good place to start, but even so, you’re only seeing a few dozen of the thousands of available problems. And they’re not thematically connected in any way. When the problems you see on that list aren’t appetizing, what can you do?

That’s why we’re building more Problem Groups. In November I wrote about how Grant Cook III has been helping with challenge creation. Today I want to introduce another special challenge: the R2016b Feature Challenge. This particular challenge is interesting because it’s made up of problems that lend themselves to solutions with new features, features that were introduced in our R2016b release. So, for example, there are some problems that involve strings and some that involve timetables.

You’re always welcome to solve the problems however you like. You don’t have to apply the new features. But I guarantee there’s no better way to learn the value of new features than writing code to solve a real problem. And although I’m biased, I think there’s no more fun and motivating way to practice coding than Cody. Spend a few minutes with these problems and you’ll come away with hands-on experience of the value of these new features. That’s better than you’ll do scanning through release notes.

So here it is: the R2016b Feature Challenge.

Here’s a fun footnote to this challenge. We added it a few weeks ago, and we were pleased to see champion solver Peng Liu add a few of his own! So this challenge is a combined MathWorks-community effort. Thanks Peng! Why not start with his problem 43663: Combine the first and last names.

And finally, I want to point out one more way that you can learn about new problems to solve. You may have even noticed it already. We added a list of Suggested Problems to the page you see after you solve a problem. It sits on the right side of the page as shown here.

So there you have it. Two new ways to find interesting problems in Cody: a new features challenge and suggested problems List after every new solution. Now you know what to try next.

Oh, right. Did I forget  to mention that you get a nice badge for completing the challenge? As of this writing, only four people have received it. Your turn!