June 21st, 2021
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 CLaIR, ed, and weekly office hours held by Juliette and Tara. 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.
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.
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 Tara'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.
Post on Ed if it's not specific to you, or email Tara for private matters.
Importantly, only the Head TA is able to grant extensions on assignments.
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 Juliette or Tara'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.