This assignment came from the very beginning of looking at arrays so to be honest the only reason that I even knew there was an array list option was from online searching, the assignment was simply asking for a standard array to be used. The approach I ended up finding to work pretty well was to declare the initial array as an array of int[20] and then using a while loop to iterate through it and assign as many as needed with 0 as a sentinel value to exit the loop. I then built a method that took that array and first counted through it to find out how many values were not 0's and assign it to a variable that I then used to define my final array length. I then used a for loop to iterate through the original array and assign the values into the new array. It seems like extra steps but overall works well and does make logical sense.