Purpose of Piazza
Piazza is a great way to ask questions about your assignments and course material in public.
It enables you to learn from questions others have, and avoid asking questions that have already
been asked. It also provides a forum for the instructor to make announcements and clarifications
about assignments and other course related topics. As a result, students are expected to read
the CS 136 Piazza on a regular basis. Piazza can be found
here.
Setting Up Your Piazza Account
After the first day of lectures, an email from the Piazza Team will be sent to your uwaterloo
email address. Please follow the steps provided below.
- Check your uwaterloo email account for the email from the Piazza Team. If the email
is not there, then you may have changed your email settings to forward all your uwaterloo
emails to another email account. If the email cannot be found in any of your email accounts,
then please email the tutors at cs136@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca .
- The email will contain a link to activate your Piazza account and set your password.
It is imperative that you provide your first and last name when creating your account
so that we can easily contact you should any problems arise.
- After activating your account, you will be redirected to the CS 136 class discussion forum.
Click on the drop down arrow in the top right-hand corner and click on Account Settings.
A dialog box will appear on the screen. Under "Preferences for Email Notifications",
select "No Emails". It is important that "Real Time" is NOT selected; otherwise, you will
receive an email every time another student posts on Piazza.
Using Piazza
To post a question on Piazza, click on "+ New Post" at the top of the page. You will have
the option between posting a question and posting a note. Questions should be posted if an
answer is expected, whereas notes should be posted if an answer is not expected but the content
of the note is believed to be helpful to both the students and the instructors.
On every question posted on Piazza, there is a students' response box where you can answer
other students' questions. Furthermore, if a student has already filled out the students' response
box but could have included more information, you can edit their response to include the
additional information.
If the student response is satisfactory but you still have questions relating to the original
question, you can ask these questions in the followup discussions box.
Instructors and TAs will be checking Piazza regularly to answer student questions and
to monitor student behaviour on Piazza. Please read the Newsgroup Guidelines below to avoid
committing any offence while using Piazza.
Newsgroup Guidelines
Here are some guidelines that you should keep in mind when posting messages.
- Please remember that everything you post is public -- everyone will be reading it.
As a result, in any posts you make to Piazza, do not give away any details in doing any
of the assignments -- this could be construed as cheating. If you have questions about
an assignment that require you to give specific details of your solution, visit office
hours or send an email to cs136@student.cs.uwaterloo.ca . We have disabled the "anonymous"
posting capability (although you will have the option of appearing anonymous to your
fellow classmates).
- Keep posts on Piazza course-related. As you are all expected to read the forum on a
regular basis, and many of you are quite busy, people don't have time to read stuff they
shouldn't have to. In relation to this, Piazza is not for posting "test" posts.
- Please read all questions and responses that are on Piazza before asking a question.
If you ask a question that has already been answered, you are wasting everyone's time. We
realize that there is a bit of a lag between the time something is posted and when it
actually appears in the group, so this is somethings unavoidable. However, please try to
avoid it as best as possible.
- Please don't post things to the group that give no useful information to people. Posts
like "I have the same question as this one posted" or "I agree with this comment" serve no
useful purpose, and waste people's time.
- Please keep complaints about the course out of the newsgroup. If you have a concern about
anything to do with the course, the best way to deal with it, and to get results, is to take
it to the instructor. Piazza is not a complaint forum.
- Please be respectful of your peers and others in your posts.
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