These instructions are about how to ask for help with your work on MAS2008,
but the advice is applicable much more generally to any situation in which
you need help with some kind of computer issue.
It is an important skill to be able to ask for help effectively. If you ask
in the right way, then the people you are asking will quickly understand what
you need. They will often be able to resolve the issue immediately, which will
be a good experience for them as well as for you, and they will be happy to
assist you again in the future. If you ask in the wrong way, then you may
need to go through many rounds of communication before the issue is resolved,
which may involve extensive delays and extensive wasted work on things that
do not actually contribute to a solution. This will be frustrating for
everyone, and will not inspire the people that you are asking to prioritise
your problems in the future.
When a support person receives a request for help, their first step will
usually be to try to reproduce the problem. You should think carefully
about whether you have made this possible and efficient.
If you are asking about a piece of Python code, then your request
should include that code, in a form that can be imported into
VS Code and run without modification. It is usually best to attach
a Jupyter notebook to your email, after first running the notebook
yourself to check that there are no issues apart from the one that
you are actually asking about. In particular, you should include any
required import statements at the top of the notebook.
You should certainly not send screenshots which would need to be re-typed.
Similarly, you should not just include a few lines of code in an
email if those lines depend on other code that you have not included.
If you send a Jupyter notebook, then you should try to remove any
extraneous code that is not relevant to the issue that you are asking
about. However, you should check that this does not prevent the code
from working for other reasons.
If you are asking about an error message, you should first read the
message carefully and make a real attempt to understand what it is
telling you. You should also search the internet for the message,
which will often give you useful information about what it means and
how to fix it. If that does not work, then you should include the
full error message in your request for help. A screenshot is sometimes
useful as well, but the main thing is to include the text in a form that
can be copied and pasted.
It may be that you attempted to perform some action, and it did not
work as you wanted it to. If so, you should report precisely what you did
and what happened, not just a general description of what your intention
was. Do not say "I tried to frobnicate the widget, but it didn't work."
Instead, say "I visited the URL http://example.com/frobnicate,
entered 42 in the widget field, and clicked the
Frobnicate button. I expected to see a message saying
Widget 42 has been frobnicated successfully, but instead
saw You fool! 42 is not a valid widget ID!". In particular,
if your report involves any web pages, then you should include the full
URL of the page shown in the address bar.
Various kinds of background information may be relevant to your request.
You should think about what facts might be relevant, and err on the side
of including too much rather than too little. Potentially relevant
information includes:
Are you using a University PC or your own machine?
Are you using the standard setup of VS Code with packages
installed using pip, or are you doing something else?
What is your Python version?
Are you using Windows, MacOS, Linux or some other operating system?