There are no explicit lab activities. The labs in this course are scheduled times for you to get help from your TA. So, they function more like TA office hours than traditional labs. (This is necessary, because with a large class if we don't assign students to different times, the TAs wind up with no students at some times and too many students at other times.) Most students use this time primarily to get help with completing their assignments.

In normal years, the labs are in CSIL, and students talk one-on-one with their TA to resolve their problems. This year, we will do as close as we can under the circumstances. The plan is as follows. We might have to revise after we see how things go.

The course has two TAs (Hamid and Anurag), both of whom have TA'ed the course before. We have eight lab sections, on Wednesday afternoons. They are at four different times, with two in parallel at each time, so each TA will have four sections.

Each TA will operate a zoom meeting from 1:30 to 5:20 on Wednesday afternoons. These meetings will have the waiting list turned on. If you want to get help from your TA, join the meeting, and you will be placed on the waiting list. The TA will admit students from the waiting list one-by-one to help. Once you have asked your question and received some advice, you must leave the meeting, so the TA can admit the next student.

As with in-person meetings, the TA may have to adjust how much time they can spend with a student depending on how many other students are waiting for help. Please understand this, and once you have some advice from the TA, go and try to work on it yourself and let other students have their turn.

You must attend the lab session that you are enrolled in. The reason is that we have to limit the number of students that a TA has to deal with at any one time. This is a strict requirement of the TSSU (the union to which our TAs belong), so we have to respect it.

The lab sections are as follows:

For help with programming problems, it might be useful to be logged in to a CSIL Linux machine when you join the lab meeting, so you can report exact error messages to your TA, for example.