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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