3 common challenges student programmers face and ways to overcome them

Coding and programming have emerged as popular, new-age career choices among students. However, this field is full of challenges and hurdles, especially for beginners. The exhilaration of being a programmer gets replaced by the exhaustion of fixing bugs in the code, meeting academic deadlines with one’s passion for programming and making some mistakes every now and then. Well, all is not lost here for budding coders. There solutions too. Here is a list of a few common challenges faced by student programmers and how to overcome them. Help your kids in this journey.

Inability to understand user requirements

The target group of users can have strong opinions on how a product should work. The perspectives of a software development team that students may work within their group may differ from their own. Moreover, it may be difficult for a new programmer to understand what a user wants they rarely interact directly with the end users.

How to overcome this challenge: If your budding coder actually wants to know what your users think about the product, encourage him to test it out. It will help in resolving issues raised by users. Secondly, he needs to check with people who have direct interaction with the end users. Motivate your young coder to talk to user experience specialists or designers. They are expected to approach each product with a human-centred design approach and are given direct access to the people who will use the final product. Their knowledge should ideally direct the code.

Debugging the errors

Well, debugging these programming errors can seem quite exhausting to newbie student programmers. Some errors are straightforward, but many are not. This results in lost time and frustration for novice programmers. Well,

programming mistakes are common. They can be found in even the well-written programmes, and it is also possible to fix them.

How to overcome this challenge: Spending countless hours trying to tackle a problem a programmer doesn’t understand might be draining. Before trying to fix a bug, one needs to figure out why they happened in the first place. Students can begin by duplicating the problem. This can help student programmers an idea about how to fix the problems. If this doesn’t help, they should seek assistance from experienced programmers.

Dealing with security threats

Users usually depend on the programmer to keep their data safe and secure from threats. Beginners, unfortunately, usually overlook security issues in their code and are unaware of the repercussions until a security breach has occurred. Being a novice programmer, students may overlook security flaws since their primary focus is on producing error-free code rather than ensuring that it is safe. Hackers are well aware of this issue and are constantly looking for new ways to get into your code.

How to overcome this challenge: It’s important to realise that hackers aren’t always online. They could also be lurking around in your vicinity. A dismissed group member, for instance, could try to strike back against the group by stealing manipulating project data using your system. To avoid this type of assault, it is essential to log off from any software, after it is used.