Getting Help

The most important skill you'll develop as a software developer is how to find answers to problems you're experiencing.

There are three steps to this:

Know what to ask.
Ask.
Apply the answer.

Searching for Answers

The best place to find answers to specific programming questions is StackOverflow.

Let’s say that you’re trying to complete an assignment that asks you to create a Java program to simulate a random number guessing game.

The first step would be to break this down into small steps:

# 1. Have the program choose a random number.
# 2. Repeat these steps until the user guesses correctly:
#    a. Ask the user for their guess.
#    b. Tell the user if they were too high, too low, or guessed correctly.

Let’s pretend you know how to do everything for choosing the random mumber.

You could conceivably try googling for "Write code for number guessing game" and find a bunch of code that would work. However, in that case you would learn very little. In addition, using such code would be considered plagiarism.

Instead, you should search for just how to do step 1: random number in java.

Those results show several examples of how to select a random number in Java.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Note what does and does not count as plagiarism when it comes to programming assignments.

Copying and pasting the code we found directly without modifying or understanding it would constitute plagiarism.

Instead, if you make sure you understand what all of the code does and why, and incorporate those concepts into your own code, that is not plagiarism.

Asking for Help

If you've exhausted everything you can do on your own, please feel free to ask your teacher for assistance. There's a common phrase used in teaching: "there's no such thing as a dumb question." While this may be true, some questions are a lot better than others:

Bad questions

"I don't know what to do."

"I'm stuck."

"I'm lost."

Good question

"I'm working on the guessing game assignment and I've been able to work out most of it except how to choose the random number. Right now, the computer always picks the number 12 as the secret number, using this code.... but I'm not sure how to get it to assign a random number."