What am I missing?

Running your code, I got the following errors:

NameError: name 'words' is not defined

fixed with changing words to string_words

NameError: name 'word_tracker' is not defined

fixed with word_track = {}

# E.g. word_count("I do not like it Sam I Am") gets back a dictionary like:
# {'i': 2, 'do': 1, 'it': 1, 'sam': 1, 'like': 1, 'not': 1, 'am': 1}
# Lowercase the string to make it easier.
def word_count(random_string):
    final_dict = {}
    word_tracker = {}
    string_words = random_string.split(" ")
    for item in string_words:
        print("Item is: {}".format(item))
        if item not in word_tracker:
            print("\t not in word_tracker, adding {}".format(item.lower()))
            word_tracker[item.lower()] = 1
            print(word_tracker)
        else:
            print("\tis in word_tracker, updating {}".format(item.lower()))
            print(word_tracker[item.lower()])
            word_tracker[item.lower()] = word_tracker[item.lower()] + 1
    return word_tracker

print(word_count("I do not like it Sam I Am"))  # {}
print(word_count("I do not like it Sam I Am") == {'i': 2, 'do': 1, 'it': 1, 'sam': 1, 'like': 1, 'not': 1, 'am': 1})  # False

Do you see what it's returning? Look at your code and trace it backwards. I added a few print statements, as you see, it never gets to the else branch.

Hi Aaron,

Several things I see here:

1. You make a list called string_words and then try to iterate over "words" which is not defined. So, the correct statement should be: for item in string_words:
2. You initialize final_dict but then use word_tracker as your dictionary. Replace all references to word_tracker with final_dict.
3. When you make the above changes, it runs, but only finds a single instance of each word ( "I" should be found twice). This happens because you don't convert the random_string to lower case first. Instead, you only convert the key of the dictionary element to lower case. So when you iterate through the string_words (which contains capital "I" twice) your logic tests if item not in final_dict (which has all lower case keys), so the else statement is never executed.

Hope this helps!