This page expains essential rules and procedures for participation in labs. In general, you should use the following procedure.

1. Check the course MOODLE page near the end of the week before your lab, which should at the time have the material for the lab published. Do this as early as possible as lab preparation may require a significant amount of work.
2. Unless stated otherwise, lab preparation and participation are solo rather than in pairs.
3. Prepare for your lab by carefully reading and understanding all provided reading material. Examine the lab tasks and seriously do task 0 of the lab, which is intended to prepare you for the lab. All this should be done before the lab. You may look at the rest of the tasks, but are only supposed to do them at the lab in front of the lab TA.
4. Arrive at the lab to which you are registered on time, and well prepared for your lab (see above). Arriving late or unprepared will earn a quick grade reduction.
5. After obtaining additional directives from the TA, start doing the lab tasks starting from task 1. You need to keep the lab TA informed of your progress at all times as you proceed, and so that the lab TA is convinced that you are writing your code in the lab. (For example, if you wrote it all before the lab, you are supposed to do it again from scratch during the lab.)
6. After each task and subtask is completed and debugged to the TA's satisfaction, you continue to the next subtask. In some cases the TA will tell you to move along without examining your code. 
7. You may of course ask the TA for help, especially if stuck on a bug that you cannot fix in (say) 10 minutes or more.
8. After completing all lab tasks, immediately submit all your code as directed by the TA. Note that all submitted code should be your own code written in the lab. Code copied from elsewhere must be clearly so indicated. Failure to follow these directives constitutes cheating (see separate page).
9. Maintain your code carefully as it may be needed in additional labs!
10. If you have completed and submitted all tasks to the TA's satisfaction, you may then leave for the day.
11. If lab time has run out, agree with the TA on your current status. Do not wait until the last minute with several tasks unexamined, as the TA will not have time to handle this. 
12. In most labs there will be a task or 2 you may do in a special completion lab without grade reduction, if you run out of time.

The above are the standard participation procedures. Some exception handling stated below.

• Justified cases where you will be unable to attend your lab (army service, illness): notify your TA ASAP. In a minor case, you should have your lab day exchanged by a handover protocol (see below). In case of a protracted case (1 week absence ot more), contact the course administrator who will determine what to do (special labs, or in some cases exemption from some labs).
• Handover protocol occurs when exchanging your lab group for one week. To do this in justified cases contact your TA together with the TA(s) of the group to where you are trying to get temporarily reassigned, and toghether with you this one-time reassignment will occur. Start this procedure as early as possible as the TAs will need to check if space is available for such an exchange.
• Completion labs occur on (2) weeks that have no regular labs, one in the middle of the semester and one at the end. These labs are for people with uncompleted tasks from previous labs, and not intended for people who completely missed a lab (except for rare cases authorized by the course administrator). These labs have special rules, as they may involve your attending lab with a different group and/or TA, and potentially doing one or 2 tasks from different labs. These labs also need a special online pre-registration which will be set up a week before the respective completion labs. Obviously, completion labs are not mandatory.