Getting Help

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

Office Hours

Nick and Ngoc 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 under their photos on the course home page.

The LaIR

LaIR takes place in person in Durand, between the hours of 7pm and 11pm PST on Sunday through Thursday. LaIR help begins on Sunday at the end of Week 1.

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.

Find more details on the LaIR Info Page.

Making the most out of LaIR

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.
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 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 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 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 office hours, or post on Ed!

I have an administrative question:

Post on Ed if it's not specific to you, or email Ngoc 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 Ngoc'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.