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| David Malan, who films CS50’s lectures in 4K high resolution, has written that the course’s high production value is “part of its pedagogy,” allowing students who tune in remotely to “feel no less a part of the classroom than students on campus. Photo: Philip Keith for The New Yorker |
Gabriel
Guimaraes grew up in Vitória, Brazil, in a yellow house surrounded by
star-fruit trees and chicken coops. His father, who wrote software for a
local bank, instilled in him an interest in computers. On weekends,
when Guimaraes got bored with Nintendo video games, he programmed his
own. In grade school, he built a humanoid robot and wrote enough
assembly code to make it zip around his home. In Vitória, an island
city, his most ambitious peers dreamed of attending university in São
Paulo, an hour away by plane. Guimaraes set his sights on the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the time he was in high
school, M.I.T. had released hundreds of its classes, free of charge, on
the Internet, as a series of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.
Guimaraes sampled the introductory computer-science class, but he found
the lecturer, a “white-haired guy in front of a blackboard,” crushingly
dull. In 2011, trawling YouTube for other course material, Guimaraes
clicked on a lecture from Harvard’s introductory computer-science class,
CS50, which was taught by a young professor named David Malan. Almost
instantly, Guimaraes told me, he felt himself “hypnotized.”
Malan, who had glossy black hair and an energetic mien, lectured from a grand auditorium on Harvard’s campus. In the first class, he illustrated an algorithm called binary search by inviting a volunteer onstage to find “Mike Smith” in the Yellow Pages; at Malan’s urging, the student opened up the phone book to a random spot, tore off the half of the book without the right name, and then repeated the process, halving the volume again and again, until only the desired page remained. Malan’s assignments, too, eased students into the arcana of computer science. Before learning C, a low-level programming language with finicky syntax, they created animated games in Scratch, a visual programming language designed for children. For a forensics problem set, inspired by a summer that Malan spent working in a district attorney’s office, students were asked to write code to restore a set of deleted photo files. “It felt like the coolest video game I’d ever gotten my hands on,” Guimaraes said.
On Harvard’s campus, CS50 culminates in a festive exposition, where students show off their final coding projects and hobnob with technical recruiters from companies like Facebook and Google, many of whom are alumni of the class; Malan provides a bevy of free paraphernalia, including CS50-branded stress balls and T-shirts that read, “I TOOK CS50.”...
One muggy morning in June, Malan visited Harvard’s campus. Sanders Theatre, where he lectures, was still officially closed, but a few members of CS50’s staff had received special permission to enter. I found Malan at a side door. He was wearing a mask and, over one shoulder, carried a backpack containing two laptops. Inside, signs in Harvard’s colors encouraged hand washing and social distancing. Doors had been propped open, to reduce human contact with knobs and handles; a red brick, stationed on the floor outside the bathroom, could be kicked aside to signal that someone was inside. Harvard had not yet finalized its reopening plans, but the university had released an interim report earlier in the week, stating that, “regardless of whether students are on campus, learning will be remote next year, with only rare exceptions.” For more than two months, Malan had been holding CS50’s office hours online, both for his Harvard class and, separately, for outside students, in sessions open to the public. Now he was going to try streaming his office hours from Sanders, to see how it would feel to teach there, in the fall, with only a virtual audience. More than a thousand students, from a hundred and nine countries, had registered to attend the day’s session...
Since Malan took over CS50, the total number of computer-science majors at Harvard has grown sixfold; according to data from the Computing Research Association, Harvard’s department grew fifty per cent more than the average university computer-science department between 2006 and 2015. (The percentage of women in the major has also increased, though only to about thirty per cent.) Lewis, the department’s pioneer, told me that the rise in interest has exposed CS50 to two separate kinds of criticism. On one side are hard-core computer-science students who assume, “because their roommates who don’t know anything” are taking CS50, that it’s “beneath them.”
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Additional resources
What Is Distance Learning For? by Keith Gessen, The New Yorker and Columbia Journalism School.
Source: The New Yorker
