Code Red Summaries
Friday, February 17th, 2017
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Doug Rudolph - 3pm to 6pm - drudolph914@gmail.com
CS 111 Trends: Not many people came in for CS 111, but the people who did
come in were all asking syntax related questions. The most common question I
personally got was about using a semi-colons after an if-statement. Teaching
them about the concept of encapsulation, and when to use french curly braces
solved all the problems.
CS 112 Trends: For CS 112, all the problems that were asked were debugging
related; most common question were asking about the meaning to an exception
message (Stack Overflow Exception, Null Pointer Exception, etc.). Showing
them how to use the Eclipse debugger and where to google the exception
message fixed the problem.
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Lydia Wang - 3pm to 6pm - secrlickq@gmail.com
I think a huge problem people have is figuring out what their own problems
are. I had people just asking stuff like "this doesnt work, it's
supposed to do this." without attempting to figure out where the bug is on
their own. People need to be willing to trace their own code for
errors and placing print statements to find out exactly what is going on but
they aren't and they just get stuck. stuff like drawing pointers out
is also something people should do so they arent asking whether their code
is right.
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SaraAnn Stanway - 2pm to 6pm - sys41@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
The biggest problem I saw was a lack of understanding of basic debugging.
Things like not knowing how to read stack traces/google error messages,
etc.; most of it wasn't actually about understanding the data structures.
Also a lot of people who didn't understand reference assignment (I.e. that
saying node x = node y won't actually alter the LL they're working on)
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Tim Yong (filling in for Biggie Emmanual who was sick) -
ty114@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
Sorry Lars, forgot to send an email - Code red was just as usual. Many
questions about 111 and 112, no questions about any other classes.
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Andrea Perieria - 1pm to 4pm - andreper@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
A few people who were lost in their own code to be honest. I had a few
asking me "if I change x in this function, will my code behave y?"
Otherwise, similar questions relating to linked lists.
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