Fundamentals and Allowed Concepts

Last Thursday when I was grading homework, I saw way too many students using functions we haven’t learned in class so last Friday, I made a rule saying we can’t use anything I haven’t taught in class, because I want to make sure they have the fundamentals down. I saw too many students use overly complicated ways to solve problems, leading their code to be way longer than necessary. Some also pulled in unnecessary data structures for no reason and way overcomplicated the code, making me believe they didn’t understand how to use the basics that we’ve been going through. The solution code was less than half of their answers. I thus made a list of allowed functions and keywords, which I will continue to update throughout the course so students know what they’re allowed to use at any given point in time.

I realized a lot of my students do “while True” and then use break to leave the while loop, even though I’ve taught them about while loops so many times now. It’s really interesting to see that but also a bit scary to realize they don’t actually know how to do a while loop properly.

Are while loops difficult or am I missing a key component in explaining it? I’m not sure.