Helping a struggling new student

Last night I had the pleasure of tutoring a friend of mine who started learning how to code with Java. I've always offered my friends to ask me for help if they were struggling with an assignment, so I was so happy when one of my friends finally took me up on my offer.

He's a business major but needs to take an "OOP for business" class. This was his first or second week of learning Java and they just learned about strings and integers. He was struggling with an assignment for several hours and finally decided to look for help outside of Google. It was an interesting assignment where it asked the students to categorise American highways based on the highway's number. This required a somewhat clever use of the '%' operator, if statements, and variables. I think it's assignments like these that new students tend to struggle with when they haven't figured out the programming mindset yet. I personally struggled with these kinds of problems when I first started.

After about an hour I guided my friend and we managed to wrestle with the assignment and work through the problem one step at a time. Eventually he figured out what was wrong and got a perfect score when he turned it in. We worked on another assignment and after going through an exercise to get him to think like a computer, he eventually figured out that one too.

This experience reminded me of why I signed up to be a code mentor. I love helping people like my friend who are ready to give up on programming because they are struggling so much in the beginning. I'm excited to meet students and help them like how I helped my friend!