Code Red Summaries
Friday, March 3, 2017
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Ishan
Patel - Senior - 2pm - 6pm - ipatel9237@gmail.com
Code red on 3/3 was pretty busy overall. The cave was dominated by 112
students because of Expression Evaluator which was due that day. There was
no real pattern in terms of the type of problems people were having, just
people that were panicking because their code didnt work and it was due
soon. I mostly spent my time helping people debug their code, though a lot
of people also needed help with Evaluate with the general algorithm for
that method.
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Doug
Rudolph - Senior - 3pm - 6pm - drudolph914@gmail.com
CS-111: Not many people in for 111 once again.
All the 111 students I talked to were looking for help with traversing
for-loops and asking questions pertaining Java syntax in order to prep for
their exam.
CS-112: All the 112 students were asking for help with
the assignment. Almost all the students were specifically asking for
help with their recursive solution for the evaluate function. Giving
each student a 5 minute debugger lesson usually did the trick.
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SaraAnn
Stanway - Sophomore - 2pm - 6pm - sys41@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
Universally the biggest problem was understanding the assignment - I
answered just one question about actual content. The rest of the time, the
problem was that nobody was able to comprehend the directions. I checked
them out myself and saw why, they're super complicated and students said
the examples were vague.
Not in Code Red but in tutoring and teaching recitations throughout the
week, I'm noticing that a lot of students just don't understand recursion.
I've found demonstrating with the call stack to be very helpful; so far
everyone has understood it quickly.
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Andre
Periera - Senior - 1pm to 4pm - andreper@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
With the Expression Evaluation project and CS111 midterm on the horizon, I
ended up explaining concepts such as the differences between stacks, the
heap, methods, and classes as well as giving recursion a fairly basic
review. One trend that I noticed was jumping from the paper portion of
designing an algorithm to coding it--students would get an idea, start a
little trace on paper, and immediately start to code it. While it's true
that we offer a course that teaches how to design and analyze algorithms, I
think it should be emphasized in the earlier courses that a person should
ideally trace out an algorithm to its full extent before jumping into code
as it would save quite a lot of time. Other than that, some students had
difficulty in implementing recursion: stack overflow exceptions galore. My
suggestion for this would be to offer some more problems in code lab (or
whatever it is that they use now) for CS111 that deal with recursion later
on in the semester. This would give them practice and an incentive to learn
it.
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Olaolu
"Biggie" Emmanual - Junior - 2pm - 6pm - biggieemmanuel@gmail.com
A lot of people needed help with using ArrayLists, probably because they are
not used to reading documentation. I would say most people needed help with
debugging which seems to be the most common problem in general.
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Lydia
Wang - Junior - 3pm - 6pm - secrlickq@gmail.com
For a lot of people, their grasp of object oriented programming is still
very weak. Also their grasp of how to use libraries in java. I
had to explain how to use an ArrayList multiple times when the documentation
for ArrayList is ubiquitous online. Also, one person I worked with
struggled to understand why she was getting bugs and that java was
statically typed. (She tried adding a String to an ArrayList of type
ArraySymbol.) I think a lot of people neglect to read all the files
that they are given, like ArraySymbol.java and ScalarSymbol.java and they
don't know how the member variables interact with each other, or they don't
see the point at all of having an ArrayList to access their Symbol
objects. So when the instructions are telling them to do something,
they don't see the bigger picture of how all the objects interact with each
other, because they are still thinking in terms of non object
oriented. And as always, debugging is a big weakness. They have
a hard time pinpointing where their bugs are and get fixated on the wrong
areas of their code. To fix this they need to add more print
statements so they can know what's going on in their code.