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Walt Schilling

Misconception: With conditionals, students may try to compare the memory address of a function to a number, like x < foo, when they intended to compare x with the return value of foo.

Organize your curriculum so that topics introduced at the beginning of the class get covered in assignments during the later part of the course to reinforce material.

Create a word counter assignment to help students understand the importance of Big-O.

Make screen-recordings of the gradings you do by hand so your students can see how you break their code and then learn from your experienced analysis.

Have all functions return something in an intro course to help students understand that functions have a start and an end, even though they are always returning.

Include a lot of visual examples in intro classes to help students learn by giving concrete visualizations of new, abstract concepts.

Have the class make instructions for a Robot class you created that will bring Chipotle back to the classroom to motivate instructions and method sequencing.

When teaching null dereferences, show a call that dereferences a null pointer in a debugger to give students a snapshot of what is happening.

Use these 5 strategies to give students useful debugging strategies that will help them fix Segmentation Faults.

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