People and Lab Hours
We encourage you to post questions on the course Edstem page so that other students can also benefit from these questions or answer them. But when you need individualized help, feel free to attend open lab hours.
Lab and Office hours
Please note that open lab hours start in Week 2. However, the instructor will likely hold office hours during the first week. Check the calendar below.
Lab hours are open times when 1 or more course staff are available for short 5-10 minute sessions on a first-come, first-serve basis in the SAL 125 computer room. We may also have certain times where you can remotely connect with a course staff to get help via your Zoom room.
The blocks of time each day when lab hours are available will be posted via the calendar below. During those times a course producer will be available either in SAL 125 or on Zoom. This schedule may change periodically so just check it before you go to lab hours for help. A separate calendar item will be made for when staff are available for remote help by joining your Zoom room. Read the details below.
- In-person (SAL 125): When you arrive in SAL, there should be a note posted on the front white board as to where CS 103 staff have setup shop.
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the staff who are on duty may leave a sign for where they are located. you can look for the course staff by matching them to the pictures below or they will often leave a message on the white board or other area as you enter regarding where they are located. They will use an online queueing system (see below for more info) to ensure fairness, so when you get to SAL, create a ticket in the queue. –>
- Zoom: Use your USC account to login to Zoom (click SSO to sign in and do not use your email/password). Start your personal Zoom room and get the URL/link to that room. Then paste that into the Help Request form to reserve your place in the help queue and our next available staff will join your Zoom room when they are available.
OH Policies
Please be aware of and follow some basic procedures with office hours:
- Typically, we will spend 5-7 minutes before moving on to help another students.
- You are ultimately responsible for working on your own code and solving problems that arise. While we will do our best to help, sometimes the error is buried under a lot of code. We likely cannot dig fully into your specific implementation. So, you should be prepared to say what you’ve done to try to find the source of the issue and/or the solution.
- If you are getting a compile error, have you searched it on the internet?
- Have you compared your syntax to examples in the slides?
- If you have a bug as the program runs, have you added print statements or stepped through your code via a debugger?
- Have you commented out sections of code until you can get something to work and then added portions back in? If the answer is no, our staff may ask you to do that first and then rejoin the queue.
- Those that we notice keep rejoining again immediately after getting help or joining the queue before office hours even start, may be deprioritized in an effort to be fair to everyone.
Calendar
Note that we may change the listed office hours as needed, or add more before homework deadlines or examinations. For an up to date listing please see the Google Calendar
Instructors
Teaching Assistants
Course Staff
