Ways to get help
Every student has moments in a course when they get stuck on some concept or problem. It's important to try to solve it yourself, but you should also consider taking advantage of some of the help available to you.
- Your first stop for getting help is the online discussion forum (Piazza), which is available 24 hours a day.
- Need clarification on a handout? Wondering about a lab? Have an R style question? These are all excellent topics to post on the CSC121H Piazza discussion board because they will probably be useful to other students.
- Piazza is a little different than a regular discussion board. Each question has two possible responses: a student-edited one and and instructor-edited one. You can answer each other's questions. Anyone can edit any student answer. That means that you can add helpful information such as an example, and you can clean up grammatical and spelling errors. Students get to help each other out, and helping each other out is highly encouraged!
- Please do NOT post assignment or exercise solutions, or partial solutions, even if you know they are incorrect, to the discussion forums. This can very quickly lead to an academic offence. Posts that do this may be deleted by the instructor.
- The instructor will be monitoring the forum to answer questions as they come up, but don't expect a quick response. (This is why you should help out your fellow students by answering questions yourselves!) Posts sent within 24 hours of a due date may not get a timely response from the instructor, so ask your questions well in advance.
- If you don't want to sign up for Piazza and participate in the discussions, you can use the read-only link to just see the posts.
- Instructor Office Hours: You can ask any question you like about the course: get help related to lecture material, go over your assignment, ask for help with your marks. You don't need an appointment to attend these, you can just drop by. Please use these!
- Tuesday 1-2pm and Thursday 5-6pm in BA 3219.
- Start the week of January 15
- Email: Use email to ask your instructor a personal question. Use a descriptive subject line that includes "CSC121". Here is an example: "CSC121: Issue with my partner on assignment 1".
- CSC121 Labs: You may also ask CSC121 TAs for help during your weekly lab.
- CSC Help Centre: Held in BA 2230, this is a place where students can drop in and ask course or computer science related questions for 1st and 2nd year CSC courses. The help centre will be open all term, Monday to Friday at 2-6pm, starting on January 10.
Note: The TAs running the help centre are not CSC121 TAs, and may not know R too well. However, they will likely be able to give you general guidance that you can use and apply to your work.
Please do take advantage of these resources! We are all here to help make this a great learning experience for you!