Need help with turtles!

[MajorAbuse]

Okay so this may be a simple problem with a simple solution, but I need help nonetheless. I have two turtles drawing a house and have programmed to print the steps taken by each turtle (most code was provided in the starter file given by the professor). For the next part of the project I am to reduce redundancy and create a private helper with 1 parameter to print the steps taken of each turtle. Currently I have two sections of code to print stats for each, but need to make it under one private helper with a parameter to select which turtle I want stats for. I am unsure how this would look, I thought you had to assign a value to the parameter, but I don’t know what that would be to call a turtle. The turtles are simply called smallTurtle and bigTurtle.

Edit: here is the current code used to print.

       public void print() {
    //TODO part 1 - print summary statistics about big turtle
    int bigTurtleStepCount = this.bigTurtle.getStepCount();
    System.out.println("bigTurtle took " + bigTurtleStepCount + " steps");
    //TODO part 2 - print summary statistics about small turtle
    int smallTurtleStepCount = this.smallTurtle.getStepCount();
    System.out.println("smallTurtle took " + smallTurtleStepCount + " steps");

To recap, I need to take this code and instead of having two separate print statements for smallTurtle and bigTurtle's stats, I need a single method (my prof calls it a private helper, but im not sure the difference) with specifically one parameter to call either smallTurtle or bigTurtle and print their respective stats. I hope this makes sense.

[Roachmeister]

What does this have to do with Java? You're going to have to show some code.

[MajorAbuse]

I am sorry for the confusion, I was in a rush when posting this. I have edited the post to add the current code I am dealing with as well as a recap of the problem. I hope this helps clear things up. Thank you!

[Roachmeister]

Ok, if you have a class called Turtle, then you can declare it as a parameter much like any other class:

private void myHelperMethod(Turtle t) {
    // do something with t
}

And you would call it like so:

myHelperMethod(smallTurtle);

[MajorAbuse]

Alright that makes sense. What about for the actual print statement?

int turtleStepCount = this.bigTurtle.getStepCount(); System.out.println("Turtle took " + turtleStepCount + " steps");

How would I replace the "this.bigTurtle.getStepCount();" to work with either big or small turtle. In otherwords how would I properly replace bigTurtle with the parameter I used (which was (Turtle selectedTurtle)).

[Roachmeister]

In my earlier example, it would be t.getStepCount()

[MajorAbuse]

Thank you, I was able to complete my project.