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Charlie McDowell

Spend extra time covering these three topics students have a really hard time with in Java: references and primitives, inheritance, and nested loops.

Draw arrows with memory address numbers written over them from Java objects to their corresponding memory address to help students connect memory models to the actual hardware process.

Encourage students to visualize how memory and references work.

Set reasonable expectations for your students, like not expecting them to regurgitate material they’ve only seen once in class, to help your students meet achievable course goals.

Explain how inheritance allows the Java toString method to work when teaching printing to help students develop an understanding for how everything in Java is an object that has hierarchical relationships with other objects.

Cover the outer-loop of nested loops when tracing through loops to help students see the inner loop runs just like a single loop during execution to help students understand nested loops.

Emphasize the difference between terms that may have a similar meaning in English, but not in code.

Use realistic examples of class variables to increase understanding.

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