A little project help..

I'm really new to programming & I'm taking an entry level course right now.My professor gave us 2 projects here (below). Does anyone think they could find the time to help me out with these projects? I'm so confused & these are our last two projects and he won't be on campus anymore. I'm not asking anyone to do them for me, but guidance would help me a lot. Please & Thank you in advance.

1.)Write a program that will read an unknown number of bowlers and their bowling scores (with possible values from 1 to 300) from an external file called "bowlingscores.txt". The file will look similar to the following:
David
102
Hector
300
Mary
195
Jane
160
Sam
210

Output the bowlers’ names to an external data file called "bowlingaverages.txt". Next to each bowler's name, print a message dependent on their scores:
For perfect scores (equal to 300), output “perfect”
For those scores greater than the average score, output “above average”
For those below average, output “below average”
Your program must include at least one function (e.g., to calculate the average, to determine the appropriate message to print, etc.).


And,

2.)Your program needs to decode an encrypted text file called "encrypted.txt". The person who wrote it used a cipher specified in "key.txt". This key file would look similar to the following:

A B
B C
C D
D E
E F
F G
G H
H I
I J
J K
K L
L M
M N
N O
O P
P Q
Q R
R S
S T
T U
U V
V W
W X
X Y
Y Z
Z A

The left column represents the plaintext letter, and the right column represents the corresponding ciphertext.

Your program should decode the "encrypted.txt" file using "key.txt" and write the plaintext to "decrypted.txt".

We covered this assignment a while ago. It's too much information---please write your own code.

Let's look at the first problem.
To read a text file, you have to open it:
fid1=open("bowlingscores.txt","r")

To write a text file, you have to open that, too:
fid2=open("bowlingaverages.txt","w")

It seems to me that you're going to want a list of the names and scores so I would initialize that:
lst1=[]

Normally (and in this case, too), you step through a file using the iterator quality of the file object:
for strLine in fid1:

Now, in your case, each line is just one thing so, after stripping off the linefeeds, you would append it to the list:
<indent>lst1.append(strLing.strip('\n'))

Now just for jollies, it's good practice to close the input file:
fid1.close()

Now lst1 has names and numbers (as strings) in succession. I would make those into a list of tuples (using list comprehension), each tuple being a (name, number) pair:
lst2=zip([i for i in lst1[::2]],[i for i in lst1[1::2]])

now each element of lst2 looks like: ("David","102)

Let's see if that gets you started on that one.


For the second one, I'd use a dictionary (actually, this is the very definition of a case for a dictionary). So just like before, you'd open the file. This time you initialize a dictionary:
dct1={}

Now, after reading each line and stripping the linefeeds, you want to add a dictionary entry like {'B':'A'} in the case of the first one. That is "if I read "B", that means "A". So now, as you read each strLine:
lsta=strLine.strip('\n').split()
dct1[lsta[1]=lsta[2]


again, see if that gets you started.