Two months ago, I wrote about harnessing the knowledge of programming to help with math homeworks. Now, what if you did not know how to code? Not to fret, I have got you covered. There is this website called CodingBat made by Stanford’s Computer Science professor, Nick Parlante, that offers problems ranging from beginner level questions to challenging questions.
Although CodingBat offers a very good system of submitting your code and providing you with which test cases for the code was wrong, CodingBat does not give you the solutions to all of the questions. Why might this be problematic? What if you were genuinely stuck at one of the questions that has no solution offered?
In order to solve this problem I used GitHub, a Git repository hosting service. GitHub allows developers to upload open source code online, enabling other programmers to view and edit a “forked” repository. Forking is a term that means to make a copy and edit. Using GitHub, I have compiled and uploaded my solutions to most of the questions on CodingBat both in Java and Python. In addition to solutions, I started adding comments in order to explain my thought process behind the program.
If you visit CodingBat with the following link, https://codingbat.com/, you can see a variety of question types ranging from warmup questions to previous AP free response questions in order to prepare you for the AP Computer Science A exam. The questions provided by CodingBat requires you to know the basics of Java; however, if you are completely new to Java, scroll down to the bottom of the page. It provides you with helpful resources.
If you are a beginner, try starting with the categories named Warmups. If you are moderately skilled at programming categories with “-1” are for you. If you are confident in your programming ability, tackling any of the “-2” or the “-3” questions will be good for your practice.
Visit https://codingbat.com/ and try some questions! And remember that whenever you get stuck, there is a solution set waiting for you. https://bit.ly/codingbat-solutions