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, and the CLaIR, Piazza, and weekly office hours held by Kylie, Sonja and Nick. To help you make the most of these resources, we've compiled a list of common issues or questions that may come up throughout the quarter, and the best way to get help for each.

Resource FAQ:

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 Piazza!

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's office hours

It turns out that code is very difficult to debug over email or over Piazza so please come in person, if possible. Specifically, we will not be allowing questions on Piazza where the main focus is debugging broken assignment code.

I have an administrative question:

Post on Piazza if it's not specific to you, or email the head TA for private matters.

Post on Piazza or email Nick

Importantly, only the Head TA is able to grant penalty-free extensions beyond the extended deadline for each assignment.

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 come to Kylie, Sonja or Nick's office hours.

Talk to Kylie, Sonja or Nick!

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.