Written by Julie Zelenski
It's likely that at least a few times during the quarter, you'll find yourself puzzling over the material, needing clarification of a course requirement or policy, or wrestling with a challenging bug. We can help! here's how:
Using the discussion forum
Our course discussion form is available on Piazza. In the forum, you can engage your peers, ask your questions, and answer those of your classmates. The staff will monitor and participate in the forum, especially to respond to questions which require an official position.
All students are encouraged to follow along with the discussions and are welcome to initiate and respond to posts. The forum tracks which posts you have viewed and will highlight new activity and unread posts. Some students make a habit to follow along with all forum traffic; others more selectively participate. You can search for posts matching a query term or tag. You can also star posts to which you want to be able to easily return. Your Piazza Account/Email Settings control whether/how often you receive email notifications of forum activity.
A few requests when using the forum:
- Before posting a new question, please search the forum to check if a similar question has already been posted. Enter single word(s) to match or enclose a phrase in double quotes to find in its entirety.
- Include a descriptive summary with your post. This helps others to efficiently skim and sort through posts. Piazza limits the summary to only 100 characters, but don't by shy about maxing it out.
- If you have several, unrelated questions, please separate them into different posts.
- Although there is an option to hide your name from other students when posting, we appreciate you participating openly on the forum. I am far more motivated to help out actual people than anonymous shadows
and likely so are your peers. - The private post feature is enabled, but please only use it where necessary (the matter involves details of your code that other students shouldn't see, or a confidential issue). If we think that your question and the resposne to it would be useful for other students, we may change private posts to public.
Email to the course staff
Email to cs107@cs.stanford.edu is the contact address for the course staff. Email is used for requests of a personal nature or questions involving the detailed specifics of your code.
A few requests when sending us email:
- Consider just using a public or private Piazza post (private only where necessary), as we tend to read that more quickly.
- Send email to cs107@cs.stanford.edu, not to a specific TA. This allows us to load-balance and track question activity.
- If you're seeking help with a bug in your code, please frame the situation. Articulate what you are trying to accomplish, everything you have tried/observed, what you think might be the problem, and what advice you need to move forward. If you've done the legwork to narrow it down, we can work with that and get you back on track, but dumping your entire program on us and asking us to tell you what's wrong... not so much.
- If you need to share some code/output/gdb session as background info to your question, it is best to copy/paste that information as text into the email. Photos and screen shots are much less convenient to deal with.
- Short, specific questions work well over e-mail. Larger-scale debugging efforts are best handled in person. If your question will require stepping through code and examining runtime state, it would be better to bring it to office hours so someone can look at it properly.
Frequently asked questions about forum and email
Why/when should I use the forum?
The forum is appropriate for all topics of course relevance, e.g., discussions of readings/lectures, advice on using the tools effectively, clarifying specifications of an assignment, sharing resource materials, and more. You may think you're the only one with your question, but with 200+ students, someone else is bound to be interested. Having the discussion in a public place means that everyone can benefit and keeps things efficient and fair for all students. The forum is open 24/7 which means you can get help from classmates who are up as late as you are! Our forum's current average response time is running an astonishing 20 minutes -- how's that for speedy service?!