Code Red Summaries
Friday, February 24th, 2017
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Ishan Patel - Senior - 2pm - 6pm - ipatel9237@gmail.com
Today was a pretty slow day but most of the people here were getting help
with data structures. The people I helped were working on the first
method, build symbols. I think most the difficult came from they didn't
seem to fully understand the assignment and when I showed them what they
needed to do and how the objects were set up in the code given to them
they seemed to get the point. Most of the time I let the students solve
their own problems and just ask them leading questions about their code.
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Doug Rudolph - Senior - 3pm - 6pm - drudolph914@gmail.com
There wasn't a big rush to the cave for anything about CS-111. The only
problems I answered for CS-111 was about the auto grader for the Auto Lab
assignment. For CS-112, several students were asking last minute Big
O questions for this weekends exam. The most common question was about
knowing what terms are considered dominant terms within the big O analysis
of an algorithm. Some other questions that were pretty common involved
Lazy Binary Search and building the BST.
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SaraAnn Stanway - Sophomore - 2pm - 6pm - sys41@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
Code red was pretty quiet today, just a couple small questions about proof
format for discrete, and one girl who wanted to learn about abstract
classes/interfaces because they occasionally show up on problem sets and
she didn't know how to handle them. another came up to me to ask for CS
advice/how to self teach data structures for next fall, because she'd
heard about how helpful the cave was at the LLC talk and apparently she
recognized me, so that was pretty cool.
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Andre Periera - Senior - 1pm to 4pm - andreper@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
It was really low key during my shift. I helped out two people--both for
conceptual stuff in data structures. One of them was more so in
implementing inheritance for the purposes of testing a function in some
driver class that they coded. That was fairly straightforward and my guess
is that (understandably so) some people want to learn how to use code from
one class in another without having to type everything out all over again.
Knowing that inheritance is a pretty powerful tool in programming (and
that it could take a while to fully comprehend it), it might be wise to
include a small tutorial on how to implement stuff like a doubly linked
list class in a separate program. Just my $0.02 on that.
The other person who I helped was for questions relating to a problem set.
I can't remember off the top of my head what they were specifically, but I
can say that he understood the concepts really well; it's just that when
it came to applying them in tandem, he got a little stuck.
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Olaolu "Biggie" Emmanual - Junior - 2pm - 6pm - biggieemmanuel@gmail.com
I did not seem to notice too many trends other than the fact that most
questions pertained to the assignment for the class. The things I saw
people needed help with were debugging(112), reading and understanding the
assignment(112), and problems specific to their assignment such as
rounding a double (111).
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Lydia Wang - Junior - 3pm - 6pm - secrlickq@gmail.com
At code red a lot of people were confused about how to build symbols and
how to parse the expression to build the symbols. I think they had a
hard time understanding the instructions and what exactly they were
supposed to do for build symbols. One girl I talked was confused
about the ArrayList of symbols and building the stack and she thought it
was one step. In general most of the confusion this week just came
from build symbols.
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Extra Stuff - Something sent to me by Jamie Liao, one of my iLab
Assistants as well as a USACS officer.
Hey Lars,
I haven't noticed things while at the CAVE, but I also teach a 111
recitation and 112 study group and I've noticed a few things. The biggest
thing I've noticed in 112 is probably the lack of a concept of objects,
references, and pointers. My students don't seem to really understand the
concept of references and that they can make pointers to objects
arbitrarily (or really the concept of references in general).
From my own experience and from what I've noticed between the jump from
111 to 112, they teach objects a little too late in 111 and automatically
assume they're experts in objects in 112. As an example, the only time (I
can distinctly remember) 111 students implemented their own objects in
code was on their final project (which many of them considered too
hard,daunting, and/or were willing to give up 10% of their grade to not
do.. or they cheated on the assignment). So these students basically went
from potentially coding/hoping for the best in their final project to
being expected to code a linked list as their first assignment. I
know that objects are something totally abstract and I sometimes too doubt
myself even now, but I do feel like 111 and especially 112 need to spend
the time to build up their fundamentals in objects because they are so
important- especially when they hit graphs and trees.
I also have noticed that my students don't really understand the concept
of Big O either. It's also another one of those things I feel 112 does not
teach you and you're expected to know once you take this class. They do
not understand how to derive Big O and are confused as to what counts
towards calculating efficiency. They do figure it out eventually, but
maybe a 30 minute segment on going over what Big O means and how to
calculate Big O may help.
A little bit of a rant.. but I'll keep you posted :)