AROUND CAMPUS
MAKING COMPUTER SCIENCE ACCESSIBLE
Cupcakes, Camraderie, and Computer Science: How David Malan Revolutionized the Culture of CS50 PHOTO COURTESY JOSEPH ONG
by Julia Eger
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rudging down into the basement of Northwest Labs one afternoon during reading period, I’m overwhelmed by a pulsing dubstep remix and the confusion of squishy stress balls being pegged at my face. Reaching the jam-packed lower level I’m greeted by unlimited candy and cupcakes, free t-shirts and a photo booth complete with Muppet props. Is this a Bar Mitzvah? No. This is CS50. Computer Science 50, Harvard’s undergraduate introductory computer science course, has not always been dynamic and popular. In fact, the class’s reputation once hinged on crippling intimidation. Although it now boasts interactive lectures, an overnight off-campus Hackathon, and the festive end-of-semester CS50 Fair, the growth of this class rests on the leadership and vision of Professor David Malan ‘99. The inspiration When Malan enrolled in CS50 in 1996, it shared the same name and general purpose as it does now – but the class’s culture was entirely different. “It was a class that students knew ‘to beware’ because of its intensity. It was not for the uninitiated,” he said. Most students brave enough to enroll had some background with computer science, even Malan, who had considered himself among those less comfortable in the subject. However, the class surprised him. “I had chosen at first to take the class Pass/Fail to get over the intensity, but for the first time in a class I liked doing homework on Friday nights. On the last possible day I decided to take it for a grade, and switched my concentration,” he recalled. Despite Malan’s fascination with the class, many of his peers were not as enthralled with it – and many interested students were too scared to take the class at all. “There were only a few students like me who had dared to take the class with little ex-
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HARVARD LEADERSHIP MAGAZINE SPRING 2013
perience, and there were always a lot of people who shied away from taking the class at all because of the daunting reputation,” he said. Here’s where Malan, several years later, sought to change things. Why couldn’t every student enjoy the class as much as he had? When he inherited CS50 in 2007, he set out to amend what he saw as the class’s two major flaws: first, that most of the student body was put off by the class’s intimidating atmosphere, and second, that the class began each semester “from the ground up” by introducing the students in the first week to a humdrum assembly language.
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What ultimately matters in Computer Science 50 is not so much where you end up relative to your classmates but where you, in Week 12, end up relative to yourself in Week 0.
-David Malan
Keeping students engaged The class culture needed revising. “I wanted to change the feeling people got in the classroom. From the first day, I wanted every student to feel they could succeed,” he explained. Making a class accessible would not make it any easier or compromise its intensity, however: the friendly and welcoming tone of the class would simply embrace those students less comfortable at the outset. And since he had spent ten years teaching at the Harvard Extension School, he was used to teaching an audience with different foundations. “I felt comfortable with all teaching styles and all types of students. I didn’t assume everyone was like me. There was a spectrum of backgrounds and comfort levels.” In his first year, Malan introduced a new program, Scratch, for the syllabus’s first problem set. As a program that revolves around tactile dragging-and-dropping blocks of conditions and actions to create animations, Scratch is meant to be an easily learned program that is comprehensible and intuitive for students of all HarvardLeadershipMag.org