Tips for getting help

CS Principles Coding and Debugging Help
1

Welcome to the debugging category!
Debugging is a normal (and, inevitable) part of learning how to code. This category is a place for the community to support each other through the process of finding and fixing problems in code. For more information on the debugging process, see Guide to Debugging .

How to get debugging help
Step 1: Provide the SHARE link for the project or lesson activity level (button is on the left of the top menu bar) - It is helpful to see and run the original code. Screenshots of code or code snippets do not always include the lines of code needed to find and isolate the bug.

Step 2: Answer the following questions: The more details you provide will help us understand your problem and speed up the process.

  • What do you intend or expect to happen?

  • What is actually happening?

  • What have you tried?

What to expect
Depending on the nature of the issue, you can expect one or more of the following responses from the community:

  • a request for additional information
  • an indication of whether this is a limitation of the platform or beyond the scope of our curricula
  • a suggestion of possible next steps for locating and/or fixing the bug
  • a discussion of the debugging process including useful strategies and common misconceptions

Note: Due to the College Board guidelines for the Create task, we may need to limit the scope of our debugging support for some projects and activity levels.**Get help debugging or answering questions about code.

2

Is it possible for students to post their Create Task here and ask for help? How much help are we allowed to give them?

3

I would recommend not posting it here. There are two issues I can foresee,

  1. This is a public forum and once the code is posted here, there is no control over who may take the code and submit it as their own. Also, college board’s plagiarism detection systems could find it here and could flag it as plagiarized.

  2. Students should be collaborating with their peers and not getting help from an adult. If an adult helps them, that would be a voilation of the College Board rules.

4

I was thinking the advice I gave on the Memory Game was legitimate in that it was an observation of an assumption they didn’t realize they had added to the specification or rules of the game plus some thought provoking questions. You are saying even that was too much?

5

I think any kind of feedback could put the task at risk. I agree that the sugestions you gave were general, not pointing to anything specific in their code. It might be okay. But, to be on the safe side I would probably not give any advice. I have responded to the post in question asking them to seek out a peer and take your advice as a starting point.

6

I was thinking that links submitted for review should be a remix that is set aside and not changed. That is, instead of submitting a link to a student account the teacher should remix the code in question then submit that for review.

I was thinking that from a development point of view, if there is a bug in App Lab then someway to duplicate that error is going to help a great deal. The exact code that shows the behavior is the fastest way to do that. Since there is probably a queue of development requests it can be some time before a developer begins to even access the problem. Keeping that code intact would be important and students are unlikely to do that.