jcb33 said:
Also a note we dont get taught to program in lectures, we get taught about programing, e.g we had 5 lectures on "The Watefall Theory" all of the lectures were almost identicle and most people on our course says the lecturer is useless, im inclined to agree
I don't know how accurate the picture you're giving is, but I'm guessing your university is expecting you to either have a fair amount of practical programming experience, or to be making a lot of effort to do some practical programming on your own now you're at Uni.
If you don't really work at catching up on the programming side, a problem I think you're going to find is that subsequent courses will also be about "ideas"; they won't worry much about the coding, because at this level you're just expected to be able to do it. But you won't be able to understand the ideas properly unless you have some idea of how you'd actually write the code. (Otherwise you sit there going "Yeah yeah, waterfall model, spiral model, blah, whatever..." You know the words but they don't mean anything to you).
It may not seem it now, but the assignment you've been been set is a very simple one compared with what you'll need to be able to do in the future. You need to be in the position where you can look at this kind of problem for 60 seconds and know exactly how you'd go about implementing it.
I have to say, from the snippets of code you've posted, I'd be fascinated to see the final code you come up with! If there are "lots of if statements" then I am pretty confident you've not gone about it the right way!
As far as the whole plagiarism thing goes, just make sure you really understand what your code does, because the chances are they
will ask you - it's pretty obvious to me that when you started this thread you didn't have any chance of doing the assignment on your own, and my guess is they'll also know that.