Search⌘ K
AI Features
Home
Courses
Decode the Coding Interview in Kotlin: Real-World Examples

Angle Between the Hands of a Clock

Explore how to determine the smallest angle between the hour and minute hands of a clock given any time. Understand the calculation of each hand’s angle relative to a fixed line and implement a Kotlin function to return the minimal angle. This lesson helps you develop precision in angle calculations and reinforces modular arithmetic and basic time-based formulas.

We'll cover the following...

Description

Given two numbers, hour and minutes we will return the smaller angle (in degrees) formed between the hour and the minute hands on a clock.

Let’s look at some examples to better understand this:

Coding Exercise

Kotlin 1.5
internal object Solution {
  fun clockAngle(hour: Int,minutes:Int) : Double {
    println(hour)
    println(minutes)
    return 0.0;
  }
}
Angle between hands of a clock

Solution

The idea is to separately calculate the angles between the 0-minutes vertical line and each hand. The answer will be the difference that is found between the two angles.

Note: Black lines in the clock represent the 0-minutes vertical lines.

Minute hand angle

Let’s start from the minute hand. The minute hand moves with 1 min intervals. At 1 min, the angle of the minute hand is 6°. . Since the whole circle of the clock is equal to 360° degrees and 60 minutes, we estimated that the minute hand moves 1 min = 360° / 60 = 6° degree with each minute.

Now, we can easily find an angle between the 0-minutes vertical line and a minute hand, using minutesAngle = minutes X 6° ...