Getting Help

September 26th, 2022

We provide a variety of support resources in CS106A to help you as much as possible with assignment, material, or other questions throughout the quarter. These include: your assigned section leader, the LaIR, the Ed forum, and weekly office hours held by Nick and Elyse.

Office Hours

Where is Durand??

Nick and Elyse will be holding weekly office hours throughout the quarter for you to discuss any questions you might have about assignments, course material, or simply Computer Science and life in general. See their office hours on the course home page.

The LaIR

Logistics

  1. LaIR takes place in person, on the 3rd and 4th floors of Durand, between the hours of 7pm and 11pm PST on Sunday through Thursday. LaIR help begins on Sunday at the end of Week 1.
  2. To sign up for help at the LaIR, use this signup link. When you fill out the signup form, you'll select a room number, and you are responsible for being in this room when you're next in the LaIR queue. SCPD students will automatically be put in an virtual LaIR queue, where they will enter a Zoom link as their location.
  3. For each LaIR shift, you can sign up any time in the 30 minutes before the shift starts. All requests submitted during the early sign up period will then be randomly arranged, and we'll let students into the queue based on this until it's full. If you sign up during the early sign up period, you will receive an email when LaIR opens letting you know that either you've been placed in the queue or letting you know that you didn't make it into the queue. During some LaIR hours, we have more students try to sign up than our capacity to help, meaning we will sometimes have to turn some people away. If you don't make it into the queue, you will have priority for the next time you sign up early. If at any point during the LaIR shift the queue has additional capacity, the queue will reopen for you to sign up to get help.

Making the most out of LaIR

  1. You should come to LaIR with specific CS106A questions - debugging or conceptual is fine. Ideally, you'll have already tried a few solutions and will be able to point the section leader to what you're getting stuck on.
  2. Plan on getting your questions answered, not finishing the entire homework in one LaIR session. When LaIR is busy, we might not have the capacity to spend as much time as we'd like with each student, so we value getting you un-stuck so that you can continue to make progress after chatting with a section leader.

How do I decide where to ask for help?

To help you make the most of these resources, we've compiled a list of the kinds of common issues or questions that may come up throughout the quarter, and the best way to get help for each.

I have a conceptual question about the course material:

We love conceptual questions. Conceptual questions are the height of all course queries. It often takes more work to figure out what concept you are confused about, but if you do that extra work, you will learn much more in return. You can ask conceptual questions to any course staff.

Go to the LaIR, stop by any office hours, email your section leader or post on Ed!

At the LaIR there is a special sign up for conceptual help called the CLaIR, or "Conceptual LaIR." This is a higher priority queue and you will get a faster response. When getting CLaIR help, section leaders won't look at your code but instead teach you the concepts you need for your homework. Understand concepts before you code! It will make life much more pleasant.

I have a bug in my code, or another question about my code:

We all get stuck when programming. There are times when the best thing to do is to work through the bug yourself -- learning by doing is powerful. However, there are also times when an experienced programmer can help get you on the right track. Course staff will help you learn how to narrow down what may be going wrong in your code and how to approach fixing it.

Go to the LaIR or stop by Nick or Elyse's office hours

It turns out that code is terribly difficult to debug over email or over Ed so please attend office hours or the LaIR, if possible.

I have an administrative question:

Post on Ed if it's not specific to you, or email Elyse for private matters.

Importantly, only the Head TA is able to grant extensions on assignments.

I want to chat about life and programming / I need to restrategize:

Anyone on the course staff would appreciate a good conversation about where this crazy world is headed. If you are interested in more specific career advice, ideas on how to restrategize your learning, or just want to talk about life at Stanford, please feel free to join Nick or Elyse's office hours.

We have no expectations for students who come to office hours - it's totally fine to just come with a general sense of confusion or the desire to work and ask us questions whenever you need to.