Misconception: students develop the habit of putting the type in front of variables; they don’t realize that this creates a new variable resulting in lots of variables with the same name.
Misconception: students struggle with scopes of variables and may not understand when a variable can be accessed and when it cannot be accessed.
Remind students to match types on both sides of the equations because they often try to combine types when creating variables.
Misconception: Students mistakenly believe comparison expressions use the same syntax in math, English, and logic.
Misconception: In Java, students struggle with equal signs because they mistakenly see them as a sign of symmetry.
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.
Misconception: Students believe that while loops tell the program when to stop rather than when to continue.
Use physical representations of zoom levels to help students understand why image quality changes when zooming in and out.
Remember that many misconceptions regarding linked lists also occur when dealing with binary search trees so that you are prepared to identify and correct them.