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.