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We expect that ALL STUDENTS WILL NEED HELP at some point in this course. If you find yourself needing help, this is not cause for embarrassment. It is completely expected. Please seek help early and often through any (or all) of the following resources.
1) Your partner and peer instruction group:
Your assignment partner or peer instructor group provide a nice first line of help when you get stuck. You will quickly learn how much you can figure out working together!
2) Open lab hours:
There are lab hours in which tutors are willing and available to help you with any questions you might have. See the tutoring schedule on the course calendar. CSE 11 open tutor hours are generally held in CSE B230 in the basement of the CSE building.
3) Piazza Discussion Board:
Use the Piazza site for any questions related to the homeworks, material in the course or course logistics. Piazza allows you to post questions anonymously (to other students) if you don’t feel comfortable revealing your name. In general all questions should be addressed to Piazza EXCEPT:
- Confidential questions that you wish to address to your instructor only. Please email your instructor directly.
- Questions about your grade. Please contact the person who graded your assignment directly.
- Posts that include portions of your PA solution. Please come see a tutor in lab.
4) Office hours:
Your instructor is always willing to help you during his office hours. If you cannot make it to your instructor’s office hours but wish to meet with your instructor, please send him email to set up an appointment. The TAs and Lead Tutors also have office hours which are listed on the course calendar (on our website under “Calendar” > “Staff Hours”).
Getting help from the Tutors, Teacher’s Assistants, and the Professors
Getting help from the Tutors, Teacher’s Assistants, and the Professors
This paragraph tells you what lab hours and office hours are meant for.
Lab and Office Hour Calendar - Always refer to this calendar.
CSE courses assignments are designed for you to learn. This means learning how to program, yes. But it means much more. You will learn communication skills. You will learn to manage your time wisely. You will find, at some point during your college career, that you may need help. You will learn how to learn.
We, the CSE 11 staff, are setting up the environment and the challenges where you may practice and experiment those above-mentioned skills. We expect all students to require help at some point during the quarter. In addition to the Piazza forums and discussion times, we offer Tutor lab hours where you may come into labs, enter the queue on AutoGrader, and wait for help. We also offer TA, Leader Tutors, and Professor’s office hours.
The tutor queue is meant for situations where you find yourself unable to figure out a problem. For example, if you are halfway through the PA, but are stuck at some part of the assignment that you aren’t able to figure out just yet, then tutor hours would be the perfect place to talk about the problem with a tutor who has experience with programming in CSE11's level. A tutor will spend five minutes to “unstuck” you; in other words, the tutors’ job is not to be a private tutor, but to help you figure out the problem. You yourself should still be the one figure out the problem. After all, it’s your learning.
There are times when tutors need to shift their schedule around. We have asked our tutors to give a public 24-hour notice on Piazza beforehand. Sudden changes don’t always happen, but we’ll try to make up for the changes however we can.
We recognize that there can be students who require more help. For example, if CSE 11 is the first CS course you’re taking in a while, you may need a further boost. In this case, you should come to office hours to spend more time discussing and communicating with the TA/Leader Tutor/Professor in addition to the tutor hours that are available to you.
Often, CSE students think that they can post their code onto Piazza and ask for help to debug.
- Code is not allowed to be publicly posted into Piazza forms. This violates integrity policies. At minimum, they must be private posts.
- It is far more difficult to help students debug code that is not ready to be compiled and run, with the other code in the assignment accessible, active on some kind of computer. When students simply paste code into private posts, the quality of help the students receive is often less than ideal.
- Piazza is an excellent resource for clearing up confusions, even for understanding the PA writeups. But for directly debugging code and understanding the Java files we give you, in-person works the most effectively.
This is why we offer office/lab hours, spreading them out throughout the week. (Exception: we don’t accommodate procrastination.)
Take advantage of the (FREE) help we are offering throughout the quarter whenever you need it.
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