Heralded months in advance by an on-campus publicity campaign, a spate of informational sessions, and a flood of invites to an open Facebook event, Yale’s first CS50 lecture opened with a live DJ and a high-energy video montage featuring a poppy soundtrack and can-did shots of past years’ students coding over plates of pancakes, pulling epic all-nighters to finish final course projects, and milling about a crowded expo of class-mates’ programming creations.
Simulcast live from Harvard’s Sanders Theatre to a crowd of around 700 students gathered in the Yale Law School auditorium, Malan’s lecture opened the first semester of Yale’s co-offering of CS50, the introductory computer science course ranking perennially among Harvard’s most in-demand classes. Numbered CPSC 100a: “Introduction to Computing and Programming” in the Yale catalog, the course kicks off its three-year trial period at Yale as one of the Computer Science Department’s anchor initiatives to widen the reach of computer science on campus.
“Whether you’re here in Cambridge, New Haven, Miami, St. Louis, Amsterdam or anywhere around the world taking CS50, CSCI E-50, CS50x, CS50 AP, we are all one and the same,” Malan said, welcoming each cohort of the course’s students, an estimated 72 percent of whom have never taken a computer science before. With several hundred enrollees, an impressive Facebook presence, and no shortage of novelties up its sleeve, Yale’s iteration of CS50 emerged from shop-ping period making clear its distinctions from traditional Yale courses and raising questions as to whether the course’s arrival may portend widening experimentation with flipped classrooms, larger class sizes, and other instructional innovations on campus.
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The class size alone distinguishes CS50. With upwards of 500 students, the class has scaled a virtual learning model larger than any previous Yale teaching initiative. In addition to the simulcast, the CS50 web-site allows students to remotely access a Livestream of the day’s lecture, an archive of past lectures, and a library of additional tutorials and resources. While Harvard currently permits students to simultaneously enroll in classes overlapping the CS50 meeting time, Yale re-quires students to enroll in the course without overlap-ping classes. Instead, Yale offers the flexibility of two course sections—one featuring live streamed lectures on Monday and Wednesday, the other featuring playback of the most recent lecture on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The backbone of the course’s on-campus teaching personnel is a force of over 40 undergraduate learning assistants, or ULAs: Yale College students responsible for leading sections, grading problem sets, and offering support during CS50 office hours scheduled four nights a week. CS50 represents a break from a University rule barring undergraduates from acting as teaching fellows. According to an article in the Yale Daily News last March, the Teaching Fellow Program Working Group committee cited the experimental nature of the course in making this exception allowable.
Tamar Gendler, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said this type of learning innovation is not new to the University.
“I see [CS50] as continuous with Yale’s willingness to try all sorts of classroom experiences ranging from the Directed Studies seminars, which is one of Yale’s signature strengths, all the way to these creative experiments that involve teaching with our collections, teaching remotely, and teaching in two places simultaneously,” Dean Gendler said. She mentioned such projects as Yale’s language consortium with Columbia and Cornell; distance learning initiatives at the School of Management uniting classrooms in Africa and New Haven; and wide use among professors of the Open Yale platform to disseminate lectures for viewing online outside of class.
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CS50 differs from traditional Yale courses in far more ways than its satellite format. From an on-site DJ for the first class to a film short of Muppet-esque renderings of Malan and Yale’s head CS50 instructor Brian Scassellati road-tripping from Cambridge to New Haven, the typical CS50 lecture boasts a production value far higher than that of most college courses. But this flashy teaching style has drawn mixed assessments. Harvard sophomore Rachel Talamo, who took CS50 last year, said she felt the class advertised itself as offering greater student gains in programming skills than the style and structuring of the course actually allowed.
“There were definitely times in the class when I was frustrated because I felt like we were spending so much time on the gizmos and the gadgets,” Talamo said. “There was a lot of information that I didn’t feel like I was being taught, and I would rather have had that information than the 3D printer or the prizes that were given to students who went up on stage.”
Others, however, see the course’s excitement as a catalyst for learning. “I really like how it’s designed to be entertaining,” Seif Labib, SM ’18, said. “It’s de-signed to keep you alert for an entire lecture.”
According to Scassellati, touches like on-stage prizes, music at the beginning of class are intended not to inflate course enrollment, but to combat existing stereo-types about computer science.
“Computer science is something that is traditionally seen as something where a lonely guy sitting in a basement does this by himself through the middle of the night. If you look actually at what happens in soft-ware firms, at Microsoft, at Google, or at Apple, that’s not at all how computer science works. Computer science works be-cause people work together in teams,” he said. “We want students to under-stand that.
“Several of those firms, including Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, are CS50 sponsors. Scassellati said these corporations fund specific, non-curricular class events, such as the first of CS50’s Friday lunches held at Sitar Indian Cuisine in early September. At that event, a Microsoft programmer and Yale alumna spoke to a crowd of 50 students who signed up in advance to hear more about life in industry over a meal paid for by Microsoft.
“There is no impact on a student’s grades, whether they participate or don’t, whether they get more out of the course,” Scassellati said. “[The sponsored events] are purely designed to allow us to foster more student interaction and to let them see what possibilities exist beyond the classroom.
“Yale CS50 student Erika Lynn-Green, CC ’18, said that links to corporate sponsors, and possible recruiters, does not alter her personal stake in the course. “My
learning to code does not just benefit Microsoft and Facebook,” Green said. “It benefits me, and if they want to help, all power to them.”
Labib also expressed positivity towards the sponsorships, but noted that tech companies might look beyond the Ivy League for under-resourced computer science programs to support.
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Yale’s unfolding experiment with CS50 offers a glimpse of what classroom techniques instructors might use to negotiate higher course demands, a topic of renewed interest given the approaching completion of two new residential colleges slated to open in 2017. Scassellati said the success of CS50’s trial run may help determine whether the unique classroom infra-structure built by the CS50 team becomes a blueprint for other classes.
“This course is very much designed as an experiment,” he said. “It is not a policy-setting course, but I think a lot of things will look back at this first run of the course. I think we’re going to learn by doing this about how we can potentially branch out in other ways and in to other courses.”
The Yale College Faculty approved moving forward with the CS50 project and undergraduate learning assistants at a meeting last fall. That approval, Gendler said, came “with no expectation that anything that was tried in the course would be precedent-setting, but also with the recognition that it was possible the things that are tried in the course would be precedent-setting.”
The course’s arrival also comes less than six months after the University’s announcement of plans for expansion of the Department of Computer Science. A March press release promised addition of seven faculty members and described the planned merging of the department with Yale’s four engineering departments housed in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
In addition to CS50, the Department is fielding a number of new introductory and upper-level courses this year as part of the new efforts to widen the Department’s reach. Those courses include such offerings as Daniel Abadi’s CPSC 113, an introductory course centered on building prototypes of web or mobile applications for consumers, and CPSC 257, a course titled “Real-World Information Security.”
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The Department’s initiatives resonate with movements beyond Yale’s campus to widen the role of computer science in American public schools and beyond. On Wed., Sept. 16, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to require all the city public schools to offer computer science within 10 years. Other major cities such as Chicago and San Francisco have made similar commitments to broadening the scope of computer science education, according to a recent New York Times article.
“Here at Yale and at colleges and universities all over the world, enrollment in CS courses has surged in recent years,” said Joan Feigenbaum, Computer Science Department Chair. “Our department is no longer tasked almost exclusively with educating future computing professionals. Nowadays, our classes are filled with bright young people who will go on to high-powered careers in science, arts, media, law, politics, business, and every other form of human endeavor.”
After CS50’s third offering in 2017, the University will assess whether or not it will make the course a permanent addition to Yale’s computer science curriculum. In the meantime, CS50—and its extravagant teaching model—will fit into the larger story of computer science’s expanding place in classrooms across disciplines.