Misconception: Students don’t understand that the right side of an assignment statement is executed before the assignment. They think that variables store unresolved equations.
Have students analyze the effects of changing pieces of a loop to improve their understanding of loop structure.
At the end of each class, have students write themselves a summary of the big ideas they learned so they get practice sifting through lots of information to find its most important ideas.
Misconception: When students use the division operator during declaration or assignment of a Double in Java, like double x = a/b, they forget about integer division, which can result in rounding errors.
Assign content as homework that students can learn from reading (like FOR loop syntax) so you can spend class time on more difficult topics where teacher guidance is the most needed (like what code goes inside of a loop).
Put more time into explaining content than you think is necessary because students may not retain all the material the first time you explain it.
Introduce Big-O using iteration rather than recursion to make this important concept easier for students to understand.
Use different methods of counting the stairs of the Eiffel Tower to explain how different algorithms affect Big-O runtime.
Have students translate between Java Array and ArrayList to highlight the differences between the two.
Misconception: Students believe that in a primitive assignment, x = y could be the equivalent of y = x; they think that the computer science “=” sign is the same as the mathematical “=” sign.