Help Us Help You: A Guide to Office Hours

Learning a programming language can be difficult, and the teaching staff is here to help you. We want to make sure that time in office hours is spent effectively and efficiently, and that you as a student get as much out of them as possible. In pursuit of this goal, we have outlined some tips below for how to approach the instructional staff and how to get the most out of your office hours.

When you’re coming to office hours, you should bring answers to these four questions along.

1. What problem are you working on?

Rather than identifying the problem number, identify what Python topic you are working on.
This will help you verbalize what concept you’re stuck on, and will give the teaching staff a better idea of how to help (we don’t know all of the homework questions off the top of our heads!!).

Example:

Instead of: “I’m stuck on Homework question 4.1”
Try: “I’m confused about writing conditional statements.”

2. How does this issue or topic fit into the problem you are trying to solve?

Now is the time to tell us what homework question you’re on, or which worksheet question is confusing to you.
Why are you using this particular approach?

Example:

“I’m stuck on writing conditional statements. I’m trying to determine whether a number is negative, because in HW 4.1, I have to return something different depending on if the number is positive or negative.”

3. What have you tried already to solve the problem?

Office hours should not be the first time you are looking at the problem!
Read the problem description carefully - you should know what outcome you are trying to achieve.

Example:

“So far, I’ve written a function that takes in an argument. The function has if and else, and I know each case should return something different. For example, if the number is negative, I should return the string "This number is negative.". Here’s the code I’ve written already:”

def smart_root(arg):
    if( ):
    # If number is negative
        return "This number is negative."
    else: 
    # If number is positive
    # Take square root, rounded down

smart_root(-4)

4. Where are you stuck?

If you can narrow down for us exactly what it is you’re struggling to understand, we can answer you as directly as possible!
Be as specific as possible.

Example:

“I’m not sure how to check whether a number is negative or not. I can look at something and know it’s negative, but I don’t know how to determine positive versus negative numbers in Python. I’m stuck on writing the expression for the conditional statement.”