Creating an average array

Question

part of an assignment that I'm working on is having me pass an array through a method that calculates the averages of the elements in the last array 5 numbers at a time.

For example, say Array1 consists of {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6} The method would calculate the average of {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} and then {2, 3, 4, 5, 6}

The method would then take those averages and put them into a new array and pass that array back into the main.

I'm just not sure where to start. The most I can think of logically is that I'm going to need to use nested loops.

And yes, this is my first year in programming.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:53

Welcome to Stack Overflow, Tony! Here at Stack Overflow, we really encourage users to provide some proof of effort or research, keep this in mind in future posts :)

Let's think about this problem logically.

We want to start by getting the average of the array from array[0] to array[n-2] (You use n-2, because index n-1 is actually holding the value '6').

For the second part. start at array[1] and go to array[n-1]
Once we know this, we can take the average and return it.

There is no need for nested loops here, remember this concept while programming and many tears will be saved: Keep it simple

Here is a similar question that was posted: How to minpulate arrays and find the average

Here is a solution that I came up with. When you are in the design stage of your program, you want to think about how you can make your code reusable. There may be a time when you'll have a complex program and many parts will need to perform the same operation with different data. This is known as code re-usability and mastering it will make your life easier.

public static void main(String[] args) {
    int [] arr = new int [] {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}; //Stores the numbers we need to average

    //We get the Lower-Average by starting at index 0, going to index n-2
    System.out.println ("Lower-Average: " + average(0, arr.length - 2, arr));

    //We get the Upper-Average by starting at index 1, going to index n-1
    System.out.println ("Upper-Average: " + average(1, arr.length - 1, arr));
}

/*
 * This method accepts a start index, end index, and an array to operate on
 * The average is calculated iteratively and returned based on number of elements provided
 */
public static double average (int startIndex, int endIndex, int [] array) {
    double avg = 0; //Stores the average
    int counter;    //Used to hold number of elements iterated through

    for (counter = startIndex; counter <= endIndex; counter++) {
        avg += array[counter];  //Summation for the average 
    }
    return avg = avg / counter; //Calculate the average and return it to caller
}

Output:

Lower-Average: 3.0
Upper-Average: 3.3333333333333335

Creating an average array

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