The instructions are not clear as they should. The student table is useless and it gives the idea that a join is needed.

You cannot get that behaviour wihout using any classes or objects in python

You don't really need math skills, this is a simple formula. You can always google this type of formulas, no need to memorize all of them.

Might be a good idea to transform the strings to uppercase or lowercase when comparing to avoid case issues

It can be way longer than 139 characters. Remember that the spaces are not going on the hashtag. Something like this "a" + " ".repeat(200) + "b" should be valid.

I don't and I struggle with it like hell :(

This is a really easy test if you understand how binary works