Technology

Why Students Often Fail to Learn Anything From Their Coding Homework and Assignments

By

David Mudd

Coding assignments are very helpful. They bring out the best in the students, test their knowledge and creativity, and also allow them to hone their existing skills. A student gets to implement the various algorithms and data structures they learn in class when they are given a coding assignment or homework. In a way, such assignments allow the students to discover themselves and find out what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Sadly, things may not always turn out this way. Coding homework and assignments, although crafted to help students learn more about programming and develop their analytical skills, often fail to achieve their goals. Sometimes the students are to blame for it, while sometimes it is the way modern education works that deserves the blame. Either way, it is the students who suffer in the long run because of all this.

Having established all this, let us delve into the reasons why students often fail to learn anything from their coding homework and assignments.

Copying Someone Else’s Code

Copying someone else’s work is arguably the easiest way to get done with your homework or assignment. With little to no effort, you can just write what they wrote and be done with it. And you will manage to have your paper accepted and even get good grades if your teachers do not catch you for plagiarism. However, is it worth it? Does getting your work done quickly or getting a good grade matter more than learning something properly?

Instead of copying, you can of course ask your friends for help. In this case, they may not help you with the code directly but can show you the approach they took to solve the coding problem. They could even tell you which data structures or algorithms they used to create the program. At least then you do not have to copy-paste their entire code.

Plagiarising someone’s code will do you no good. Things will get worse if your instructors catch you red-handed. So instead of cheating, it is better to take help from your tutors or other online tutoring and homework assistance services. Use online and on-campus resources to help yourself. That is a more reasonable approach to take even if you struggle or fail to complete the whole assignment.

Seeking Help from the Wrong Places

Programming is a very intriguing topic, be it a part of your course or subject, or not. Thus, there are many resources online that can help you solve your problems. YouTube and Github are very popular in this regard, but they are not enough. These resources will not help you learn much in most cases. Hence, you have to seek help from professional tutors and coding experts.

Various homework assistance and online tutoring platforms can help you in this regard. SweetStudy is one such platform that can cater to all your programming-related queries. With SweetStudy, homework help is easy to get.

They have expert tutors and teachers who will do anything to help you out. These tutors will not only provide you with answers but will show you how it is done. They will use flowcharts and diagrams as necessary to explain everything to you and help you learn and develop your analytical skills instead of just giving the code away.

Platforms like SweetStudy are far better than Github and YouTube in the sense that they are not just showing you what to write in your code, but also how you can write it, and why you are having to write it.

Not Asking Questions

A coding assignment or homework needs to make students feel curious. And this curiosity should come at all stages of writing the code. They need to ask themselves questions like why am I using this algorithm and data structure in particular, what benefits can I get from using them, what are the limitations of said algorithm and data structure, how can I handle such limitations, and so on. In some cases, the questions in their heads may not be part of their assignment or homework, but that is the beauty in all of it.

Programming needs to make you curious, and it is only when you are curious that you will start asking questions. And then to answer those questions, you will have to dive deeper, read books, work your way through your class notes, etc. Only then can you reap the real benefits of such coding homework and assignments.

Hence, parents need to expose their children to these programming principles through early coding for kids schools.

These are some of the more common reasons why coding homework and assignments cannot bring the best out of students. However, as long as you can avoid these points, and do as suggested, you can make the best out of your programming tasks.