The course teaching team is eager to help you. No appointment is needed to see us during our office hours. If these hours are not compatible with your schedule, contact one of us to make an appointment at a time that does work for you. For quick questions (such as making appointments), you can easily catch me after class, or before class if there is time after I am done setting up. You can also call me at my office, 855-3376. If I'm not there, I may well be working at home, where you are welcome to call me at 336-3221 between 9am and 5pm.

We can only help you effectively when you have made an attempt to study the material or do the assignment on your own and come with questions. Our goal is to help you discover how you might have solved your problem on your own. That will help you master the material in this course and improve your problem solving skills, which will serve you for a lifetime.

When you come for help with a program, have it available in your CFS, in a directory containing all and only the files related to the program. Also bring a printed copy of the most current version of your program. If you are unable to get past the design stage, bring your design notes (however tentative). If you have a problems indicated by an error message, mark in your program listing the line referred to in the first error message or two and write down the message. Of course it is essential that the listing correspond to exactly the same version of the program that produced the error message. 

Do not expect quick fixes. We are not a debugging service. After a problem has been located or a reasonable debugging technique has been found that will bring you closer to solving your problem, you are expected to implement the improvement on your own and make an effort to resolve the next bug, if there is one. Of course you may return if you have made such an effort and are stuck again. But we will not resolve multiple bugs in one advising session. You would learn little that way. Obviously advising cannot be relied on to resolve multiple bugs just before an assignment is due, and until your program is working you have no way of knowing how many errors it contains. So the only safe approach is to start work early and plan on completing the assignment well before it it due.

Little if any help can be provided for problems specific to home machines or development environments other than the IDLE.

A tutor list is maintained by the undergraduate computer science office in LH225. There is also a newsgroup, cs.tutors, which is used both to request and to advertise tutors. The course staff cannot recommend individual tutors.

The Student Academic Center offers a one-credit course on study habits and other general academic assistance.