Question

Im having a lot of trouble debugging in IDLE...any suggestions?

Answer 1

look at your code and put print statements in it at strategic locations.
print variables, calculation/comparison results, accumulators ... stuff like that. you will be able to see what is actually happening and you can compare that with what you think should be happening.

it can help to format your print statements
open the documentation from idle with F1 and on the index tab put in "% formatting". read the String Formatting Operations section

online docs link: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-formatting-operations