Minimum element in a tuple
Berkeley CS61A alum here. Your solution looks fine. Having sat through many a lecture where the prof would go through problems like this, I can pretty much guarantee this is the solution that would have been given:

def min_element(tup):
    min = tup[0]
    for element in tup[1:]:
        if element &lt; min:
            min = element
    return min


So this solution might be considered by someone really pedantic to be a bit "better" than yours since it is less verbose and because, in general, recursion tends to be slower than iteration. Your solution works just fine though :)