Birthday Paradox Checker

Intro – Step 1 – Step 2 – Step 3 – Step 4 – Step 5 – Step 6 – Step 7 – Step 8 – Extension

Step 1 – generate a random birthday

To deal with birthdays, I'm just going to use the day of the year.

So, rather than 1 January, it'll be Day 1, and 31 December will be Day 365.

This makes things a lot simpler to do!

1. Open IDLE and go File > New File to create a blank programming window
2. Start with  import random. This tells Python you're going to need to deal with random numbers
3. Then add a title and a blank line because it looks nice
4. Then use  date = random.randint(1, 365) to create a random number between 1 and 365

   This will give us a totally random birthday
   We'll store this in a variable called date

5. Then print the date
6. Save your program in your OneDrive. Call it something like "birthdays"
7. Run your program to check it works (Run > Run module)

You should get a random number between 1 and 365

If there's an error, check your typing – the word randint is a tricky one to spell

Produced 2026.