I feel like I'm not understanding the question right with this set search challenge

So the question at hand is, and I'm a little unclear as to exactly what its asking us to do. Read, and i'll explain below what I get from it step wise on creating said function.

Let's write some functions to explore set math a bit more. We're going to be using this COURSES dict in all of the examples. Don't change it, though!

So, first, write a function named covers that accepts a single parameter, a set of topics. Have the function return a list of courses from COURSES where the supplied set and the course's value (also a set) overlap.

For example, covers({"Python"}) would return ["Python Basics"].

So, given the pretty limited coverage in this section on sets so far (I like how he just said, go read all the documentation first, experiment a bunch, then come try the challenge. Kind of throwing the standard operating procedure so far for lesson structure here out the window, but I'm not here to rant about that even if it is making this a bit more frustrating.)

From my understanding here of the question, we need to make a function named covers, give is a single parameter (single input? or a parameter that accepts multiple inputs, the part that says "a set of topics" makes me wonder about that, since it would make the function better if it could search for courses that shared any number of subtopics like "give me all courses containing functions, booleans, and loops, instead of just searching for a single word in the dict values.

Then have the function take those to compare against each key (course)'s values(subsets, or subdicts? From what I read, the course values are sets, even if to a neophyte like myself they are indistinguishable from dictionaries, or are they always sets if you nest them within a dictionary?). I'd imagine we'd want to use intersection and compare it to the value's that matched our user supplied topics, and return the result of that as a list.

So step wise is where I was getting confused here, because I know this challenge in particular is more about how you get to the result, rather than the actual result. Because it's easy enough to do a for in loop with the dictionary searching for the supplied user input (though, I was having trouble with figuring out how to have it accept more than one topic at a time. Maybe have it look at a tuple with a list inside?

Anyway my breakdown was

1.) Define function (easy enough) - def covers(topic) - (I feel like this input isn't right, maybe I'm misreading it though) 2.) compare the user input against supplied values in each key 3.) return keys who contained the chosen topic/'s value/'s in a list format

Initially after running up against X:Bummer: Try again! multiple times with my initial attempt I found someone else in the last video comments who basically came to a similar conclusion, but was returning the elements to a set instead of a list.

Then I thought, "maybe it wants me to use the set operations for this? I mean, it would make sense" so I modified my original one, though I'm sure there's an easier way, I thought I needed to take the results from searching the COURSES set for the chosen topics that I'd put into a list(which needed to become a tuple, because lists can't be added into sets), and create a new (or, add into an empty set). Then, my control set which was fixed as COURSES, compare against the new one, and return a list of their shared elements (which, from what I understand the intersection operation is for that.

With that however it just wound up returning an empty list, it felt like I was on the right track, but as usual I'm afraid I may have overthought the problem, creating unnecessary new problems for myself, further enshrouding the solution to my gaze.

My original attempt looked like this, with the current state of my code being at the bottom.

def covers(topics):
    list1 = []

    for key in COURSES.keys():
        if topics in COURSES[key]:
            result = key
            list1.append(result)
        else:
            continue
    return list1

print(covers("strings"))

COURSES = {
    "Python Basics": {"Python", "functions", "variables",
                      "booleans", "integers", "floats",
                      "arrays", "strings", "exceptions",
                      "conditions", "input", "loops"},
    "Java Basics": {"Java", "strings", "variables",
                    "input", "exceptions", "integers",
                    "booleans", "loops"},
    "PHP Basics": {"PHP", "variables", "conditions",
                   "integers", "floats", "strings",
                   "booleans", "HTML"},
    "Ruby Basics": {"Ruby", "strings", "floats",
                    "integers", "conditions",
                    "functions", "input"}
}
def covers(topic):
    holding = []
    ctrl_set = frozenset(COURSES)
    hld_set = set()
    tpl_conv = holding,

    for key in COURSES.keys():
        if topic in COURSES[key]:
            result = key
            holding.append(result)
        else:
            continue

    hld_set.add(tpl_conv)
    comparison = ctrl_set.intersection(hld_set)

    return list(comparison)