Am I even on the right track with this decrement code?

Hi there! Unfortunately, I see a multitude of problems with your code. But that could be because you've worked on it so long that it now no longer resembles what you started with. So I'm going to show you my solution and then walk you through it.

import random

def even_odd(num):
    # If % 2 is 0, the number is even.
    # Since 0 is falsey, we have to invert it with not.
    return not num % 2

start = 5

while(start):
    randNum = random.randint(1, 99)
    if (even_odd(randNum)):
        print("{} is even".format(randNum))
    else:
        print("{} is odd".format(randNum))
    start -= 1

Ok so the even_odd function is something that Treehouse provided for us, and we do not do any coding in there. All it 's going to do is return a true if a number is even and false if it's odd. That's it's sole purpose.

Secondly, we set up a variable named start and assign it to 5. This should bring you through the second step.

Now, the first two steps are rather straight-forward. The next step is going to challenge you to think "truthy". Remember, we're going to run this while loop while start is "truthy". The value of start is 5. Any non-zero number is "truthy". But it's not explicitly equal to True. True is "truthy" and 5 is "truthy" and 1093890 is "truthy". But only the first one is exactly equal to True. With your code, the loop will never start. Because 5 is not equal to True.

I set up a variable to get a random number between 1 and 99. Then I send the random number I generated into the even_odd function. If it returns a true, we print out that the number was even. Otherwise, we print out a number was odd message.

Lastly, your start -= 1 is not indented correctly. This will result in you getting far more results than expected as the start number will only decrement if the number is odd. We want this to decrement every time through the loop. When start reaches 0 start will no longer be "truthy". Remember "truthy" can be any non-zero number. But at 0 it becomes "falsey". The loop will then exit.

I hope this helps! Good luck!