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How to Ask For Help ​

It's inevitable that you will get stuck on at least one homework assignment in this class. This is natural. What's not natural is sitting, staring at the screen, frustrated.

To get un-stuck, you'll have to ask for help. Here's how:

Send an email to Mr. Nathan (nathan@sheep.education).

Communicating over email is always about context. You need to provide enough context for him to help.

Enter a subject that is related to the assignment you are working on. It can be the assignment name, or the particular problem you are trying to solve.

In the message body, answer these questions as specifically as possible:

  • What is the problem?
  • Is there an error? If so, what is the text of the error?
  • What do you think the problem is?
  • What did you expect would happen when you ran your code?
  • What is happening instead of what you expected?
  • What have you tried already?
  • Show your code.

Here's an example:

Subject: Dice rolling

My dice aren't rolling.

I'm not getting any errors.

I don't have any idea what's wrong.

I added the code to roll the dice, but it just returns [Function: rollDice].

I thought it was going to return an array with 2 dice rolls, like [1,6]

I was looking at it but I don't know what is wrong.

Here is my code:

console.log(rollDice);

(etc., paste all your code here if you can)

Before you send the email, pause for a moment to put yourself in your teacher's shoes and ask if you have provided enough context so that Mr. Nathan will understand what you are doing and what you need.

Faster Help ​

Emailing Mr. Nathan may take a few minutes or a day, depending on how busy he is. Have you considered googling it?

Search engines are basically giant text matching programs that can search the entire internet. Perhaps some of your question can be answered by a clever search phrase instead of sending the email. In this case, maybe someone has had a similar problem. Remove the parts that are customized to your program (like the name of the functions), visit google.com, and search for that error.

With the above example, I would probably use this to start searching: JavaScript console.log returns function name

Another great idea would be to paste the entire email with a little more context into an AI assistant like ChatGPT. When I put this text into ChatGPT:

I'm in a coding class learning JavaScript.

(( Paste the ENTIRE email body from above ))

I received this message as an immediate response:

It seems like you're trying to call a function named rollDice, but instead of invoking it, you're just logging the function itself. To actually call the function and get its return value (which should be an array with two dice rolls), you need to add parentheses () after the function name.

And then it provided me some sample code. Be careful using code generated by AI chatbots (see our AI policy), but definitely feel free to use its advice.

Further reading ​