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!
Using the discussion forum
We host a course discussion forum on Piazza. Here you can engage with your peers, ask your questions, and answer those of your classmates. The course staff will also monitor and participate in 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 inclusive to all. The forum is open 24/7 which means you can get help from classmates who are up as late as you are!
A few requests when using the forum:
- Before posting a new question, please search the forum to see if a similar question has already been answered. Enter single word(s) to match or enclose a phrase in double quotes to find in its entirety.
- Use a descriptive summary for your post. This helps others to efficiently skim and sort through 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 not enabled for our Piazza forum. If your issue is not appropriate for a public audience (i.e. private to your situation, requires discussion of detailed specifics of your code), please email
cs107@csinstead.
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:
- Send email to
cs107@cs, not to a specific TA. This allows us to load-balance and track question activity. - If you need to share some code/output/gdb session as background info to your question, do not send photos or screen shots; instead simply copy/paste that information as text into the email.
- 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.