Misconception: In C-based languages, students don’t know when to use and not use pointer derefrences (*) and reference-operators (&).
Misconception: Students frequently forget to close tags or other paired constructs when writing HTML and CSS code, this error is called unclosed pairs. To help prevent this, have students write both open and close HTML tags before adding content.
Justify the reason that Java Strings are immutable by showing how Strings might be packed together in the heap to help students resolve incomplete understandings in their mental model.
Misconception: Students often think that classes hold Objects rather than understanding that they’re a blueprint for Objects because of the main method.
Misconception: Students incorrectly assume that Java’s substring method is destructive and wrongly anticipate the original string will change.
Misconception: When passing arrays in C/C++ students often forget to pass in the size of the array and to use [] (square brackets) to make the variable an array.
Misconception: students forget about language-specific or paradigm-specific material (e.g., new/delete or types) when they switch between languages that don’t use the same concepts.
Misconception: Students have difficulty using the correct data types in Java because their go-to data type is int most of the time.