Resources

Communication, help, university resources, and policies

Communication Norms

We’ll use Canvas for announcements, grades, and Piazza communication.

We’ll use Piazza (linked from Canvas) for course-related questions outside of class. This ensures that everyone has access to the answers and helps me keep everything in one place.

If you have a question outside of class, search Piazza to see if it has already been asked and answered. If it hasn’t, feel free to post a new question. You can post anonymously if you prefer. For anything personal, however, email is the right channel.

Whether via Piazza or email, I’ll do my best to respond within 24–48 hours, excluding weekends.

Addressing Coding Issues

  • A red X on your homework: open your repo’s Actions tab and read the failure message first — it names exactly what’s wrong (a missing file, a script that errored, an object it expected but didn’t find). Fix that specific thing and push again before assuming you need help.
  • When your code errors: read the error message’s last line first, then the line number it points to, before assuming something unrelated is broken.
  • When you can’t fix it yourself: try inputting the error into an internet search engine or search Piazza to see if the issue has been addressed already. If it hasn’t, post your question; you’re probably not alone!
  • Still can’t fix it? Come see me! You can stop by during my drop-in hours or use the “Schedule an appointment” link in the Syllabus contact block, or catch me after class.

Academic Support

The StAAR Center offers free resources to all students, including writing-related appointments, subject tutoring, and academic coaching on skills like time management and navigating procrastination. Visit the StAAR Center website to make an appointment.

Accommodations for Students with Disabilities

Tufts is committed to providing equal access to all qualified students through reasonable accommodations. If you have a disability that requires accommodations, contact the StAAR Center by email (StAARCenter@tufts.edu) or phone (617-627-4539).

If you receive accommodations through the StAAR Center, I’m happy to accommodate your needs. If your accommodations include extended time on in-class exams/quizzes, please plan to take your extended time before class, not after (and, of course, I ask that you not discuss the quiz with others to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of the material independently). Accommodations can’t be applied retroactively, so please reach out as early as possible.

Mental Health

Mental health concerns or stressful events can diminish your ability to participate in daily activities, including academic ones. Free, confidential mental health services are available through Tufts’ Counseling and Mental Health Service (CMHS), which offers consultation, brief counseling, and urgent care at no cost. To make an appointment, call 617-627-3360; visit the CMHS website to learn more about their services and resources.

Religious Accommodations

Tufts values and acknowledges the religious diversity of its student body. If you’re seeking accommodations related to a religious holy day, please reach out early in the semester so we can make a plan together; the University’s religious holy days calendar and Religious Accommodations Policy are both available through the Office of Religious and Philosophical Life.

Assignments in this class exist to guide you through the actual mechanics of programming, and to let both you and me track your progress honestly through the semester. Tufts holds all students accountable to its Academic Integrity Policy, and code is not exempt — the work you submit needs to be your own.

The same rules, whether your help comes from a person or an AI tool

I confer with colleagues and use AI tools frequently in my research and teaching. For example, to help me develop this course, I consulted with Prof. de Ruiter, a computer scientist and psychologist who taught this course before, and with my son, a software engineer. I also used Claude (Anthropic) and Gemini (Google), which helped me translate my vision for this course into a reality (e.g., brainstorming, sequencing/scaffolding, defining the scope of the course, drafting materials (including code!), and building the course website). Consultation with people and AI tools helped me create a course that I hope you enjoy and helps you learn.

So, for sure, I’m fully on board with working with classmates and using AI tools; they’re both reasonable approaches to getting help and learning. But in a programming course there’s a real gray area between getting help and copying, and that gray area doesn’t change depending on whether the “someone” helping you is a classmate or a chatbot. If you simply copy code from others when you get stuck, you’ll likely fail to learn the principles that underlie why you got stuck and how you got unstuck. Thus, here are some rules when it comes to getting help from other people or AI tools, adapted from a collaboration policy written by Prof. JP de Ruiter:

  1. You may get help from others — classmates, AI tools, whoever — but every line of code you submit has to be your own, and you need to be able to explain how it works and why you wrote it that way.
  2. If something helped you — a classmate, an AI tool — cite that help in your code (a comment is enough). When in doubt, cite it.
  3. You’re welcome to ask others (people or AI) for help, and to help classmates review their code. But you — and only you — should be the one adding or removing code from your own program. The short version: discuss the program, discuss the problem, don’t talk code.
    • When you’re helping someone else, or prompting an AI tool for yourself, describe how to approach the problem; don’t hand over exact code to type in.
    • When you’re getting help, don’t let a person or a tool tell you exactly what to type, or type/paste it in for you.
  4. Don’t post homework questions to any online forum, and don’t feed a homework prompt into an AI tool expecting a complete solution back. Generic conceptual questions are fine either way; anything specific enough to hand you the answer isn’t, whether the source is a forum or a chatbot.

As you probably know, other humans and AI tools make mistakes, sometimes confidently wrong ones. Verify the information you receive from other people or chatbots rather than blithely trusting it; that’s part of what rule 1 above already asks of you.

For a longer, thoughtful take on AI’s role in coursework, see Prof. Andrew Heiss’s notes on AI.

If work isn’t your own

Please read Tufts’ Academic Integrity Policy directly, which provides general information about academic integrity that complements the rules above. If there’s reason to believe submitted work isn’t a student’s own, it will be investigated and, if warranted, reported to the Dean of Students Office, as university policy requires.

Want your project public? (optional)

Your course repo will stay private inside the course organization by default to maintain the privacy of your academic work, and nothing about your grade ever depends on making your work public. If you decide, however, that you’d like to make your repository visible to others as a portfolio piece, you can make a public copy on your own GitHub account after the semester ends; just follow the instructions below.

  1. On your course repo’s page, click the green Code button → Download ZIP, and unzip it on your computer.
  2. Look through what you unzipped and delete anything you’d rather not share publicly. For example, you might decide you don’t want to share the homework folders and only make public the final project (task/, data/, analysis/, and your README). That’s up to you.
  3. On your personal GitHub account — not the course organization — create a new repository, named whatever you like, set to public (or private if you want to wait to make it public).
  4. Add file → Upload files, drag the contents in, write a short commit message, and commit; this is the same upload flow you used for HW1.

The copy of the repo in your personal account is entirely yours; you can do whatever you want with it. Your course repo inside the Tufts Coding for Psychology organization stays private and unchanged, and it’ll be the only repo I access to evaluate your work in PSY 0110/0210.

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