Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
CS50 was a gigantic intro class designed to whet non-comp-sci students appetite for coding and computer science, generally. (I took it when it was C&#x2F;PHP, so they may have changed things.) While the lectures are very straightforward, the smaller &#x27;sections&#x27; lectures with the dozen-or-so teaching fellows were more intensive, and p-sets were pretty challenging for newbies. The weekly help sessions ended up being a million lost students in a giant hall waiting to see one of a few dozen TAs offering uneven pedagogical quality. The assignments were often automatically graded upon submission and you often have some equivalent of a unit test to see if you got it right before submission, so you know if you got it <i>wrong,</i> but not <i>how wrong.</i> Just having a resource for sanity checks and walkthroughs of lesson concepts without trudging to the hall-o-TAs is prolly really useful.<p>Totally legit philosophical debates aside, I think this is a great use of the technology. It&#x27;s a very, very well-funded class (bigger dedicated full-time year-round staff than some entire <i>departments</i>,) so I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s not a half-assed effort.<p>Malan is a great lecturer and his CS50 classes are all on YouTube. I sometimes send new coders to them but they&#x27;re a fun watch, in general.