Consulting Information for CSE142/3 Students

[3/01 HP]

The Introductory Programming Laboratory (IPL) in Mary Gates Hall is the principal lab for CSE142 and CSE143.  Front-line consultants for both courses are available most of the time that the lab is open. This note is a brief description of the kinds of help you can expect and what you need to do to best take advantage of it.

Goal

The consultants' goal is to provide quick help when you're stuck, to get you past that roadblock so you can continue to make progress on your own.

All programmers get stuck from time to time - that's part of the process.  It can be extremely helpful to talk things over with a colleague or have someone look at your code and point out places that might be a problem.  A consultant can serve as a sounding board and a source of advice and ideas, but ultimately you are the one who has to track down and fix problems when they occur.

Consultants will ...

• Spend at most 3 to 5 minutes with you at one time (that is enough time to identify things you need to check further).
• Help you identify what you could do or try next, then move on to the next person while you try that. 
• Help explain error messages or show you how to find more detailed explanations.
• Help you understand how to use commands and tools in the development environment (the debugger, in particular).
• Listen to your explanation of what you think is happening, and point out differences between your explanation and what the code appears to be doing.
• Help you locate parts of your code that might be causing problems, particularly inconsistent use of variables at different places in the code, and unclear or overly complex algorithms.
• Suggest when it would be best to get away from the detailed code on the computer and rethink what you're doing at a higher level.

Consultants will not ...

• Attempt to debug your program in detail - that's your job.
• Give extensive tutorial help if others are waiting. (Normally, TA and instructor office hours are the right place for this.)
• Spend time with you if you are not adequately prepared.  (Priority has to go to students who attend lectures and sections regularly, keep up with the course, have analyzed the homework and developed a solution before showing up in lab and starting to code, etc.  It's only fair that students who have prepared have first claim on the available consulting help.)

Your Responsibilities

When you work with a consultant, you should be able to ...

• Explain the code in your program and why you wrote it that way.
• Explain what you expect to happen when your code is executed.
• Explain the significance and contents of variables in your program.

Being able to articulate exactly how you expect a program to behave isn't easy at first - in fact, it's a big part of learning to program.  But it is important that you be able to describe what you are trying to do.  One of the key ways a consultant can help you track down problems is by identifying possible inconsistencies between the code and your explanation.

There is no way that you will remember all of these details in your head.  You need to include comments in your code to record these things.  Consultants will not try to help you reconstruct this information from raw, uncommented code, and will move on to another student who is prepared.

If you want a consultant to help you with a bug, you are expected to try to track it down yourself and gather evidence first.  Most of the time you'll be able to discover the problem yourself, and, if you can't, you'll have the information the consultant needs to help you.  If something is wrong,

• What works?  What's broken?  How do you know?  (evidence found using the debugger, extra print statements, etc.)
• What's changed?  (Be suspicious of everything  you changed recently if the problem is new.)
• What do you expect to happen?  What happened instead?
• How far does the program get before things start to go wrong?  What part of the program could be causing the problem?

The consultant may ask you to work through a short checklist before asking for help to make sure you have taken the first steps toward solving your problem.

Finally, be a good citizen.  For instance, don't keep putting your workstation number on the list if you don't really need help right then (if the same number appears more than once on the list of students waiting for help, the consultant will erase all but the last occurrence).