Constantly getting stuck at Challenge Questions - Do I just have to keep retrying and waiting before I can move on?

Hi there! This probably isn't what you want to hear, but I recommend you keep trying. Trust me, I've done my share of Treehouse challenges. The "teaching assistants" you refer to are the videos and the documentation provided by the developers of the language you're studying. I might recommend a change in mindset. These courses undergo rigorous quality assurance before they are released, and some of that is done by fellow students. Go into the challenge knowing that it is possible to solve it with just the information provided in the video and the documentation.

These challenges are meant to be challenging. They are here to test your knowledge of what you've just learned. Much of programming is about taking the information you read in documentation and other sources and applying it to a specific problem.

As far as the Bummer!, I know it can be irritating when they aren't specific. When this happens, I try the code for the challenge either in a workspace or in my local environment. It's much easier then to say exactly what my code is doing and why it might not be passing. Sometimes my code doesn't do what I think it's doing, which is why the challenge is returning a Bummer!.

Having done quite a few challenges, I can give some generic tips:

• If you're receiving a "Communication error", resist the temptation to click on any buttons other than the X to close the warning. Wait a few seconds and run "Check work" again. If you still get a "Communication error" message, you need to try this in your local environment. Chances are that you've inadvertently created an infinite loop.
• If you receive a compiler error and it says it's on line 16 (for example), but you can't see anything at all wrong with line 16, start looking upwards in your code. Chances are the problem lies in one of the lines before line 16.
• If the challenge says that it's not getting back the results it expects, run it on your local environment. See if the results match. In many cases, the results must match to the letter. This includes spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and even spacing!
• Try not to do anything not explicitly asked for by the challenge. Even if functional outside the challenge, it can cause it to fail because the requirements are no longer being met.
• If you believe you're overthinking it, you're likely correct.

While you might appreciate the hints of other sites (and others might too), I would point out that this platform is a bit unique in that they don't offer that. I believe this to be on purpose. The vast majority of these errors are things that you would experience in a real-life situation. If your variables don't match what is required by the specifications, then that would be the same in a code review at a job. An infinite loop in JavaScript run in your browser will cause the browser to crash. An infinite loop in Python will cause the system to eventually kill the process. Compiler errors are very really the compiler errors you will experience when programming on your own and there will be no "hint" button available then.

All of this is an effort to assure you get the best education and preparation for real world programming.

I'm not Treehouse staff. I'm a student just like you, but I hope some of this has been helpful!