Code Red Summaries

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Every Friday between 1pm and 6pm in the CAVE we hold Code Red, our drop-in peer based tutoring program for Computer Science. Students can come alone or in groups and, without having to make an appointment, get tutoring from one of their upper level classmates. After each session the tutors are asked for a small summary and/or trends that they noticed during the sessions. They are collected here so that instructors can see what the tutors are seeing and hearing from the students.

If you have any advice or instructions for the tutors, see something that we can be doing differently, or just want to chime in and let us know what we could be looking for to help you fine tune your instruction, just drop me a line at biglars@cs.rutgers.edu.

I include the student tutors emails next to their names so you can reach out to them to discuss a particular topic or observation. Please do so, the students would love to hear from you.

Lars

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Code Red Summary for 4-14-2017

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Friday, April 14, 2017

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Andre Periera - Senior - 1pm to 4pm - andreper@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

Code Red today was definitely busier than our previous days. A good number of people were there for help with the latest Data Structures assignment, but there were some people from CS111 as well. A common trait that I noticed in both concerned objects. For data structures, working with a hashmap and concepts such as the difference between an empty string and a null valued string were common. For CS111, it was how one class played off of another and how we can access those values (I personally saw some polymorphism there, which I think *shouldn't* be involve this early in a student's CS academic career). At the end of the day, whether it be a hash map or an array or a string, they are just objects with values and ways of accessing them. Losing touch with the basics can definitely make implementing something like a small search engine or using skeleton code particularly difficult. I'd suggest for the students to get more in-tune with objects and how they play into their code (this will be especially useful when Discrete Structures comes along).

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Doug Rudolph - 3pm to 6pm - drudolph914@gmail.com

CS 111: Only a few 111 students were in the CAVE, and all the questions they were asking were about setting up the Milestone 2 project within Eclipse. Luckily for a few of them using windows, they were able to import the project using the default import menu with Eclipse. For Linux and Mac users, I had to explain how to manually set up an Eclipse Java Project, explain the difference between .class files and .java files, as well as explain where to put external assets for the assignment.

CS 112: Several students were asking for debugging help when it came to the Little Search Engine assignment. I showed a few students how to use the debugger and I helped them debug some pretty basic mistakes that were overlooked when working on their filtering algorithm within the top5Searchs method.

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Olaolu "Biggie" Emmanual - Junior - 2pm - 6pm - biggieemmanuel@gmail.com

From what I could tell students just needed to go through their algorithm with someone to see if it made sense.

-Olaolu Emmanuel (Biggie)

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SaraAnn Stanway - Sophomore - 2pm - 6pm - sys41@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

I helped a number of people at Code Red and throughout the week. With very little exception, none needed my help with anything algorithmic. They just couldn't understand the directions for the 1112 assignment (specifically the insertLastOccurrence method in the little search engine project). After I explained it one student did try to "explain" his algorithm to me...it took about five lines for me to realize he was just going line by line hoping I'd point out potential errors he hadn't run into.

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Past Summaries

CRS for Code Red - 4-14-2017

CRS for Code Red - 4-7-2017

CRS for Code Red - 3-31-2017

CRS for Code Red - 3-24-2017

No Summary for 3-17-2017 (No Students, Spring Break, CAVE closed)

No Summary for 3-10-2017 (Attendance was nil as it was day before Spring Break)

CRS for Code Red - 3-3-2017

CRS for Code Red - 2-24-2017

CRS for Code Red - 2-17-2017