Swelling growth in popularity of CompSci

[John Shillington]

I think this is interesting, and a sign of how CompSci is shifting into the centre of the general academic curriculum because "in pretty much every area of study, computational methods and computational thinking are going to be important to the future.”

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/11/cs50-breaks-enrollment-records/?page=single

John

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John Shillington

VP, Technology

Cybera Inc.

mobile: +1.780.700.2548

Cybera is a not-for-profit organization that works to spur and support innovation, for the economic benefit of Alberta, through the use of cyberinfrastructure.

[Cam Macdonell]

I've heard a talk from David Malan who lead the redesign of CS50.  Prior to the "CS Winter" of the mid 2000s when enrolments plummeted , CS50 was the "course from Hell".  Very hard and a lot of work.  Seeing the downturn we all experienced, they redesigned it to make it approachable for CS and non-CS people alike.  They have succeeded.

There's an expression that Harvard is a hedge fund with a campus.  Their nearly $30B endowment provides them many...opportunities :)  Students have access to CS50-only gaming lounges, almost 100 staff just for CS50 (many undergrad TAs in there), weekly pizza-fuelled hackathons, it goes on...

Here's a promo video of the course https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj-lpK2r0E0

You can check out and even take the course online here https://cs50.harvard.edu/

The upside for non-Harvardians is that they do release all their resources including a teaching VM that I use regularly (https://manual.cs50.net/appliance/19/).

Amazing work, I would've loved to take this course as an undergrad.

Cam

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