I was a little bit confused by the assignment here, too, but I _think_ this isn't quite what is being asked for. It's asking you for the number of 'a's in each value, which indicates you should look at each original value, and figure out the number of occurrences of an 'a' and then replace it with an integer. You'll have to iterate over both the keys and the values to make this work, which I believe is the point of this part of the exercise.