Getting Help

Avenues

Make liberal use of our drop-in hours (posted on the sidebar).

We will use Piazza for all electronic questions. Protocol:

• First check Piazza to see if your question has already been asked.
• If your question does not reveal an answer to an assignment, post it publicly. Chances are that other students have a similar question and will benefit from your post and the responses. Note that Piazza allows you to be anonymous to your classmates if you choose.
• If your question is about course material or logistics but reveals part of the answer, or you're unsure if it does, post it on Piazza and mark it private. I may edit it and switch it to public if I think it's useful to others.
• If you're asking about a personal issue (i.e., not concerning the course content or assignments), e-mail me.

Questions will be answered within 24 hours.

You are encouraged but not required to answer other students' questions when possible. Explaining a concept is often the best way to learn it.

We're using Piazza rather than Google Groups because it's easier to browse and organize questions, allows code and math markup, and has anonymity controls.

You can choose to be notified of every new post, or get digest e-mails, or no notifications at all. Regardless of your settings, you will receive any important announcements that I make. If you are not subscribing to every post, it is recommended that you visit the site every so often to update yourself on the discussion.

Tips

Start on assignments early so you have time to clarify your issues.

When writing code, try to keep in mind the big picture. It's easy to get hung up on debugging and implementation details, but understanding the concepts and principles of the algorithms you're implementing is important for the quizzes (and what you get out of the course more generally).

Staying engaged during class and doing the readings will likely make your assignments and studying go faster.