I pretty much don't get why it's throwing an error at me...

Hi Antoni,

The name attribute belongs to the class Student. You have moved it into your method.

When you put name back to being at the class-level instead of method-level, you will see that you can no longer access it as just name, because it isn't in your method's scope. This is where you use the self keyword to access that variable.

For example:

class MyClass:

    my_attribute = "hello, world"

    def some_method(self):
        print(self.my_attribute)

Observe that my_attribute is outside the method some_method and to access it we have to prefix it with self..

Instance

An instance is a concrete 'thing' made according to the description set out in the 'class'. Think of the class as being a recipe and an instance as being a particular cake made using that recipe.

self

A single class can make any number of instances, just like with a recipe we can make any number of cakes. Since the code in a particular class may end up in many objects, we need some way of referring to a particular instance of the class from inside the class description. This is where we use self. It's hard to see with the example from the challenge because every instance of the class will be the same, but it might be more clear if we look at a simple example that gives every instance some unique value.

class Greeter:

    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name

    def greet(self):
        print("Hello, {}".format(self.name))

If some of the syntax above is unfamiliar, don't worry too much, just know that the __init__ method is what is used to create custom instances. Here we give it a name value, and it'll make a custom Greeter with that name property inside it.

For example:

g1 = Greeter("alice")
g2 = Greeter("bob")

When we call the greet() method on each instance, we'll get the correct name:

g1.greet()  # "Hello, alice"
g2.greet()  # "Hello, bob"

Observe that we are using self in the greet method to tell the class that we want to print the value that belongs to that particular instance, not something that belongs to the class.

Hope that clears things up for you.

Cheers

Alex