Skipping every other element after the first

Question

I have the general idea of how to do this in Java, but I am learning Python and not sure how to do it.

I need to implement a function that returns a list containing every other element of the list, starting with the first element.

Thus far, I have and not sure how to do from here since I am just learning how for-loops in Python are different:

def altElement(a):
    b = []
    for i in a:
        b.append(a)

    print b

Answer 1

def altElement(a):
    return a[::2]