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Tommy MacWilliam
Here are my top 3 reasons: support, communal excitement, and accessibility with rigor.
Support. CS50's support structure is better than any other course at Harvard, and I'd imagine it's far beyond most courses at other universities. In addition to lectures, we also offer sections tailored to students' learning levels, 50+ short topical videos, a huge set of interactive practice problems tagged with topics, and videos that walk you through how to approach each problem set.
When I was Head TF, we had a teaching staff of over 110 people (which also included volunteers), yielding a student to teacher ratio of around 8:1. When we hire TFs, we don't just look for great programmers; we look for great teachers. Undergrads rarely have any teaching experience, so CS50 hires people who are excited to share their CS knowledge with the community and who care about their students' success [1]. That means that when you email your CS50 TF at 3am in a panic, you're going to get a good answer, and you're going to get it fast. Many courses don't prioritize that experience.
Since we're a CS course, we also thought very seriously about our course's software. For example, we built our own website and iPad app with the explicit goal of making office hours more efficient so more students could get help [2], and we designed custom forum software optimized for staff members to write fast answers. We have lots of resources, so we're able to dedicate them to creating good tools.
Communal excitement. CS50 is exciting by design. Every lecture is intentionally high-energy and theatrical so students are excited to learn. The course also puts on massive events like Puzzle Day, the Hackathon, and the Fair to add to the excitement. The excitement is not derived from the events themselves, but from community they create. You're not going through the course alone. Not only do you have 100+ staff members to help you, but you're also with 800+ of your peers who are working on the same exact hard problem you are. Then, after you finally complete CS50 you're given to opportunity to showcase your final project to the entire university community. (I remember giving a demo to both a Google recruiter and Drew Faust.) Other science courses are starting to copy this model, but as a course, CS50 is a pioneer in creating excitement through community.
Accessibility with rigor. In my experience, most introductory CS courses tend to fall into two camps: overly accessible and overly rigorous. For example, many "bootcamps" focus on just learning a single language or framework (like node.js or Ruby on Rails) in the interest of accessibility. However, students only end up learning basic programming, not computer science, and they don't have a solid foundation or transferrable skills. On the flip side, the syllabus for MIT's 6.00(x) includes topics like "inferential statistics" and "coefficient of determination", which are way too math-y and scary for people who have never programmed before. CS50 strikes the best balance between the two. CS50 emphasizes that 3/4 of its students have never programmed before, but the course still challenges you to implement a hashtable in C (which, by the way, is hard) rather than make a stupid animation. It's become a rite of passage on campus to "survive" CS50, particularly among those who have never written a line of code before.
[1] Joseph Ong's answer to What are the motivations for Harvard undergraduates to become Teaching Fellows of a class?
[2] CS50 Revises Office Hours to Be More Social, Efficient | News | The Harvard Crimson
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Here are my top 3 reasons: support, communal excitement, and accessibility with rigor.
Support. CS50's support structure is better than any other course at Harvard, and I'd imagine it's far beyond most courses at other universities. In addition to lectures, we also offer sections tailored to students' learning levels, 50+ short topical videos, a huge set of interactive practice problems tagged with topics, and videos that walk you through how to approach each problem set.
When I was Head TF, we had a teaching staff of over 110 people (which also included volunteers), yielding a student to teacher ratio of around 8:1. When we hire TFs, we don't just look for great programmers; we look for great teachers. Undergrads rarely have any teaching experience, so CS50 hires people who are excited to share their CS knowledge with the community and who care about their students' success [1]. That means that when you email your CS50 TF at 3am in a panic, you're going to get a good answer, and you're going to get it fast. Many courses don't prioritize that experience.
Since we're a CS course, we also thought very seriously about our course's software. For example, we built our own website and iPad app with the explicit goal of making office hours more efficient so more students could get help [2], and we designed custom forum software optimized for staff members to write fast answers. We have lots of resources, so we're able to dedicate them to creating good tools.
Communal excitement. CS50 is exciting by design. Every lecture is intentionally high-energy and theatrical so students are excited to learn. The course also puts on massive events like Puzzle Day, the Hackathon, and the Fair to add to the excitement. The excitement is not derived from the events themselves, but from community they create. You're not going through the course alone. Not only do you have 100+ staff members to help you, but you're also with 800+ of your peers who are working on the same exact hard problem you are. Then, after you finally complete CS50 you're given to opportunity to showcase your final project to the entire university community. (I remember giving a demo to both a Google recruiter and Drew Faust.) Other science courses are starting to copy this model, but as a course, CS50 is a pioneer in creating excitement through community.
Accessibility with rigor. In my experience, most introductory CS courses tend to fall into two camps: overly accessible and overly rigorous. For example, many "bootcamps" focus on just learning a single language or framework (like node.js or Ruby on Rails) in the interest of accessibility. However, students only end up learning basic programming, not computer science, and they don't have a solid foundation or transferrable skills. On the flip side, the syllabus for MIT's 6.00(x) includes topics like "inferential statistics" and "coefficient of determination", which are way too math-y and scary for people who have never programmed before. CS50 strikes the best balance between the two. CS50 emphasizes that 3/4 of its students have never programmed before, but the course still challenges you to implement a hashtable in C (which, by the way, is hard) rather than make a stupid animation. It's become a rite of passage on campus to "survive" CS50, particularly among those who have never written a line of code before.
[1] Joseph Ong's answer to What are the motivations for Harvard undergraduates to become Teaching Fellows of a class?
[2] CS50 Revises Office Hours to Be More Social, Efficient | News | The Harvard Crimson
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
