Office hours
- When
- Fridays, from 13:00 — by appointment only
Email us with what you want to discuss and we will give you a slot. Turning up without one does not work: we are often not there, and someone else may already have the time.
- Come with
- A specific question, and what you already tried
"I expected this line to print the total and it printed nothing, and here is what I checked" is a question we can answer in five minutes. "It doesn't work" is not.
- Good use of the time
- Ideas you could not get from the lecture or the workshop
A concept that will not click. An error message you have read and still cannot interpret. How to approach a piece of work. What the exam expects.
- Not what this is for
- Technical support, or having your code written
We do not fix laptops, install software, or debug line by line on your behalf, and we do not repeat a session you missed. The workspace exists so that nobody needs local setup; the materials for a missed session are on this site.
Interactive — best first stop
- Visualize
- Python Tutor
Paste code, watch variables and function calls change step by step. Use it every week — it shows exactly what the lectures describe.
- Practice
- futurecoder
Free, in the browser, starts from absolute zero. The catch-up path if sessions 2–3 move too fast for you.
Books — free online
Official documentation — for checking, not learning
- Python
- The Python Tutorial
When your AI assistant claims a function behaves some way, this is the ground truth.
AI assistants — the course ground rules
- Which tool
- Any free chatbot works for the workshops
The course requires no specific product and provides none.
- Privacy
- Never paste people
No names, grades, or personal data into any assistant. Course data is synthetic on purpose.
- Responsibility
- You are responsible for what you keep
The model wrote it; you committed it; it is yours now.
- Exams
- Paper, proctored, no devices
The exams test what stays yours: reading code, tracing it, and judging output.
Getting help
- In session
- Neighbor first, then a hand up
Most blockers are thirty-second fixes your neighbor just solved.
- Between sessions
- Course forum on Moodle
Link published at semester start. Public questions get the fastest answers — someone else has your problem too.
- Personal matters
- anna.smirnova@unil.ch
Anna Smirnova, teaching assistant. For anything that shouldn't be public — not for debugging.
