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Misconception: Students believe that boolean values can only be used in conditionals.

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  • Explain to students that boolean values are comparable to numbers or strings in that they can be used anywhere when programming.
    • This will encourage students to treat booleans as they would any other object.

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Tags

  • Content Misconceptions
  • CS 1
  • Intro Programming
  • Programming Concepts
External Source

"Visual program simulation in introductory programming education" by Juha Sorva.

Other Tips By
Other Tips By Juha Sorva

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Allow students to resubmit their first few assignments for the course so they can master basic concepts and be rewarded for their persistence.
Ask students "do you know in advance how many times you'll need to go through the loop?" when deciding between using a for or a while loop, because this is a good rule of thumb for them to use.
Use scoreboards to motivate the use of variables because young students have developed strong mental models for scoreboards through previous exposure allowing them to quickly understand what variables are.
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