[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: This is CS50.
DAVID MALAN: Hello, world.
This is the CS50 podcast.
My name is David Malan.
BRIAN YU: My name is Brian Yu.
And today, we thought we'd talk a
little bit about the CS50 Fair, which
takes place at the end
of CS50 every semester,
an opportunity for students to
show off their final projects.
I've been to, what is it now,
five CS50 Fairs, I think.
Now, how many CS50
Fairs have there been?
DAVID MALAN: There have been 12,
and I have been to all 12 of them.
BRIAN YU: All right.
What was the first one like?
DAVID MALAN: The first one was
similar in spirit to what you see now,
if any of you listening online have seen
any of the photographs or video footage
from them.
But it was smaller scale.
BRIAN YU: Was this the first
year that you taught the class,
or does it come about later?
DAVID MALAN: This was second year.
So this was in 2008, when we
had 287 students in the class.
So it was a smaller scale event.
We divided it into just a couple--
two or three shifts of students,
with maybe 100 or so
students, give or take,
presenting their final
projects at any one time.
But it was in our original space on
campus, the building of a basement
called Northwest Science, which is one
of the science buildings on campus,
with a big concrete floor area,
lots of tall ceilings and pillars
that we were able to set
up a whole lot of tables
on for students to present
their final projects.
BRIAN YU: And the CS50 Fair
now-- especially for people
who've seen it online, probably have
seen photos of what it looks like now.
It's fancy.
There are balloons.
There's high tables with
nice tablecloths all over it.
Was it like that from the beginning,
or what was the first CS50 Fair
like visually?
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, it was actually--
so the whole intent of the CS50 Fair,
for those unfamiliar, is to be a
course-wide and campus-wide exhibition,
if not celebration of students'
final projects in the course.
In a nutshell, for CS50,
our undergraduate course
in computer science,
students can implement most
any software-based project of interest
to them at the end of the semester.
And the goal of the CS50
Fair was to provide a vehicle
at the end of the semester
for students to present
their work to classmates, to staff,
and to students, faculty, and staff
from across campus.
So yes, I worked with one of
our earliest assistant head
teaching fellows, Yuki Yamashita, who
was a junior or senior at the time.
And he and I pretty
much spent winter break
over the phone and email planning
the very first CS50 Fair.
At the time, Harvard's
exams were after the break,
so the very first CS50 Fair
was actually in January,
not in December, which it now is, when
the course was closer to concluding.
And we pretty much knew the
dimensions of the space--
the basement space of Northwest Science,
big concrete floor and pillars--
and we knew the distance
between all of those pillars.
And so we essentially came up with
all of these estimations and models
using Photoshop or some other
such tool to mock up the space.
And we knew we wanted bar-height tables.
We wanted students, and staff,
and faculty to be able to walk by
and not have people
seated or crouching over.
We got just very simple tablecloths
to cover everything to the floor.
And then we realized we
wanted to decorate the space.
And the easiest way to decorate a
space, especially with tall ceilings,
is just to put some balloons
with helium on string.
And so that's what we did
early on to adorn the space.
BRIAN YU: And how did
you figure out where
to get enough tables to
have 300 people present
their projects and enough balloons to
fill an entire basement of a building?
It feels like there's a lot
of just upfront logistics
to figure out in terms
of how to make this work.
And now we can just rely on, oh,
let's do what we do last year.
But the first time must
have been much tougher.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, no, we
had to envision everything
off the top of our heads.
And when we-- I'm guessing
we asked someone at the time,
hey, where can we get a
100 bar-height tables?
Well, Harvard doesn't have
its own supply of those,
and so there's a local place that
we ultimately had to rent them from.
The tablecloths as well.
We knew way too much about the
per-unit cost of tablecloths and tables
at the time.
But we also, from that same vendor, for
instance, got a few popcorn machines.
We wanted to make it
kind of like a fair,
really, like a carnival of sorts,
albeit academically oriented.
So we got two or three
popcorn machines, the idea
being that the teaching fellows
and the staff running the event
could pop some popcorn, and it would
be a nice way to say hello to people
and greet them on the way in.
I think not the first
year-- eventually, we
tried cotton candy machines,
which is so much fun to make,
because you finally understand how it
works by putting a little paper cone
'round and 'round in the sugar.
But oh my god, what a mess it makes.
You don't really want
free-flowing sugar in the air,
so we killed that after a while.
BRIAN YU: The popcorn
machines aren't easy to use.
I remember struggling to figure out how
to actually make popcorn in the popcorn
machine the very first time,
because I'd never actually used
a popcorn machine before.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, no.
There's the big carnival-style ones
or that you'd get from a vendor
off the street.
So secretly, in recent years, we've
started pre-buying the popcorn
in really big boxes--
BRIAN YU: [CHUCKLES]
Makes things a lot easier.
DAVID MALAN: --just like
the movie theaters do,
but we put it out on display in boxes.
But we actually really
did very nitpickily think
about all of the low-level details.
We had-- even the popcorn boxes, we
wanted to make sure that they were flat
and weren't just paper things,
because we wanted students
to be able to put them down,
and passersby put them down
while interacting with
students' laptops.
I think we even had water
machines, like dispensing water.
We deliberately got
those conical cups that
come to a triangular point as
opposed to flat bottom ones
because we wanted people literally to
finish any water they had in their cup
so as to minimize the risk that
someone was going to put a cup of water
down near a student's laptop and spill.
So we were even obsessing to
that level of detail early on.
And while we didn't do
this the first year,
we actually realized quickly that
in such a large group of people,
the balloons that we first got for
the first year or more of the fair
were latex.
And unfortunately, too many people
are allergic to latex, potentially,
especially when you have hundreds
of them floating around in the air.
So after one or more years,
we switched to foil balloons,
Mylar balloons instead, which
unfortunately are more expensive,
but they don't have the allergens.
BRIAN YU: Huh, that never would
have ever crossed my mind.
Were there any other
surprises, things you
weren't expecting that suddenly came
up during the process of planning
and executing that very first fair?
DAVID MALAN: That was certainly one.
Not so many surprises,
otherwise-- we eventually
realized that we don't need to worry
too much about conical-shaped cups.
We eventually got flattened bottom cups.
And knock on wood, nothing bad has
happened to any laptops with water.
No, I think we--
and Yuki was great at this event
planning, and envisioning designs.
We introduced some very deliberate
design decisions, like we had--
we wanted to invite some
industry friends, and alumni,
and recruiters, really, from companies,
popular tech companies that we
knew students might have an interest
in working for over the summer
or full-time.
So we actually invited eight or so
such folks from industry that year,
but we very deliberately put
them at the back of the room.
One, we didn't want companies
to be the focus of the event.
It was obviously supposed to
be focused on the students,
and so a supermajority
of the tables were indeed
allocated to students'
laptops and their projects.
But we also very deliberately, when
people came into this large space,
wanted to pull them
through the whole space.
So even those upperclassmen,
or say, juniors and seniors
who might be there primarily to look
into job opportunities, but secondarily
wouldn't mind chatting with friends
and seeing their projects and so forth.
We wanted to compel them to go through
the space, see all of the projects
before they actually reached the table.
So we tried to think
about details like that.
And then we did introduce the first
year-- oh, yeah, this was unforeseen.
We got stress balls, which are just
these squishy spherical things that
say CS50 on them, or CS50 stress
ball, literally, nowadays.
And we wanted the TFs to hand them
out as people came into this space,
and descended this beautiful
staircase that leads into this space.
What we didn't expect was that the
TFs would start throwing the stress
balls at attendees, which was
actually kind of an issue,
because they don't hurt, and
it's not a danger like that,
but when you're throwing the
stress balls up a stairwell
and you don't necessarily
have good aim, then
do the balls come back down thanks
to gravity and knock things over.
So it's been hard to put downward
pressure on that tradition,
but I think we finally killed it off.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, well, we've moved-- so
Northwest was the original location.
That basement was the original
location for the first fair.
And you stayed there for 10 years.
Is that right?
DAVID MALAN: Oh, let's call it--
10 years.
Yeah, 10 years, and then two
years now in a different place.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, and so this new
location, how did that come about?
So we just-- in the
last two years, switched
to holding the CS50 Fair in the Smith
Center, this newly-renovated part
of Harvard's campus.
Did you know immediately that's
where you wanted to move the fair to,
or how did that come about?
DAVID MALAN: Yeah.
So Harvard recently renovated a building
that was once called the Holyoke Center
and is now called the Smith Center.
And it's more of a
community space on campus.
They gutted the first couple of
floors, enlarged the ceilings,
and made this beautiful big open
space called Harvard Commons, which
is a glassed-in area that has chairs,
and tables, and a little stage,
and just a lot of big open space.
And the best feature of it is that it's
100% central in Harvard Square, which
is the heart of the area
right next to Harvard Yard,
and whereas Northwest Science was
one of these buildings on campus
that really was on the
periphery, so it's a destination.
Like, you have to intend
to go to the CS50 Fair,
and therefore, there's that non-zero
activation energy to just get
attendees to come chat with folks.
So the fact that it's
now in Harvard Square
is great, because we have all the
more passersby, even tourists,
people who are just poking their head
in to see what goes on at a university,
and what our students have accomplished.
And the upside of that is
that there's all the more
attendees to chat up
our own students and ask
them to show off their projects.
So hopefully, it's a
win-win for everyone.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, that sounds
like a huge advantage.
Because Northwest-- if you're unfamiliar
with the layout of Harvard's campus,
if you look at a map
of Harvard's campus,
Northwest is in like the
far corner of the campus.
And on some maps, it's
just cut off altogether.
You can't even see it.
So it is-- you do have to journey
a little bit in order to get there.
What did you do in the very
first year before people
knew what the CS50 Fair was like to
get faculty and other students to be
able to show up in order to talk
to students about their projects?
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, a lot of
hoping that very first year.
It was one of those things where--
I know it's kind of a
dated reference now,
but if you ever saw the movie
Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner,
there's a line in it.
If you build it, they will
come, or he will come.
And we sort of likened--
I liken this to this experience,
where we were putting together
this pretty large-scale
event for 300-plus students,
and we hoped, hoped, hoped, hoped
that people would actually come.
So spoiler, they did,
and it's wonderful,
and we've done 11 more since then.
But there was just a lot of
straightforward publicity
with postering on campus, and
emails, and word of mouth,
encouraging students to
invite people they knew.
But we also introduced a
couple of other elements.
And this, I do think, was a
very last-minute decision.
And I don't recall where it
came from, but we decided--
starting with the very first CS50 Fair--
to have a raffle, as you know now,
where we would give every attendee
a printed program, a brochure
that explained the event and had a map
of the space and a few other things.
But it also had like 10 or 12
spots for smiley face stickers
that were initially blank.
And we then gave to all of the
students presenting their work
10 or 12 smiley face stickers.
And the instructions to
attendees were, for any student
who you chat up and ask them about their
project, like hey, what did you do,
or hey, can I see a demo,
the student was then
authorized to give you a smiley face
sticker for your printed program, which
took the dual role of a raffle card.
So if you chatted with as
many as 10 or 12 students
over the course of the fair, you could
accumulate up to 10 or 12 stickers,
each one of which
represented, indeed, an entry
into a raffle with fabulous prizes.
And they were kind of fabulous.
We did procure and had donated to
us for students things like an Xbox,
and a Wii, and all the fun toys that--
especially electronic-- that
people might like these days.
But it was just another way of trying
to get attendees to come, ultimately
for the projects, and for
the students in the class,
but also help grease the social
friction to give them yet another reason
to come see their friend or roommate.
Heck, you could win
an Xbox along the way.
BRIAN YU: I think that's been
a great part of the fair,
because it just means that constantly--
so anyone who's there at the fair
is talking to people, and
is asking people questions,
and it really always feels like
people are engaged, and curious,
and they're talking.
[INAUDIBLE] a little bit of
that extra impetus to do so.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah.
Hopefully it just breaks the ice, right?
Because you would like to think that
every attendee would be comfortable
coming up to you and say, hey, Brian,
what did you do for your project?
But if you can kind of couch
it in like, hey, Brian,
what did you do for your project, when
you're really there for the sticker,
but you would certainly benefit from
and enjoy hearing about something neat
that the student worked on, it kind of
helps break the social ice, we hope.
And so we've kept it for
now 12 years, 12 stickers.
BRIAN YU: So you now,
over 12 fairs, have
talked to a lot of students
about a lot of projects.
Any that particularly stand out to you?
Any really memorable projects
that you remember from past fairs?
DAVID MALAN: There are,
and this is hands down one
of the biggest FAQs of CS50 itself.
The official answer is that I love
them all equally, as you know.
And honestly, it's hard
to even have favorites.
Because we have so many students--
like 800 this most recent semester--
you see so many projects,
and there's such a range.
I really don't tend to have favorites.
The ones that do stick in my
mind often, only because they
are different from a
lot of the projects,
is anyone that integrates some piece
of hardware with their project,
or any kind of tool or technology
that we didn't teach in the class.
And this is characteristic of
a lot of students' projects.
Some projects are absolutely inspired
by things like CS50 finance problem
set, where you build a
stock trading website,
so you can see elements of
Bootstrap, and Flask, and SQLite,
and these elements that students
use in the course's problem
sets that they then use
in their final project.
And that is totally the
point of the final project--
to take the new-found
knowledge of programming
up for a spin and design
something of their own.
But I'm always so impressed
and amazed how many students
and how many projects implement
something that we did not taught them.
And I've come to realize, this is
the biggest compliment, I think,
as just being part of the class and
its instruction, that students now
are so empowered as to not just
apply lessons learned in the class
explicitly, but to go off on
their own and feel sufficiently
comfortable and sufficiently
capable of figuring out
some new tool, or some
library, or some language,
and then applying it to
a project of their own.
That is by far the coolest thing.
And it makes me think
and hope that we're
doing something right
that so many students are
able to do that after only three months
of a CS course, their first ever.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, it's always amazing
to just see that delta of students
at the beginning of the class having
not ever written a line of code,
and just making Mario's pyramid appear
with one or two or three or four rows,
and then just a couple
months later, they're
building all sorts of really
interesting and cool stuff.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, no, I mean it.
At the end of the semester, I usually
send a congratulatory email of sorts
to all students.
And I encourage them to think back
on how, some 12 weeks prior, mario.c
was hard, where we asked them in
that problem set just a printer
a hierarchical pyramid of
hashtags on the screen.
And it is hard, certainly if
it's your first time programming
with C, let alone any language.
But my god, they come so far
by the end of the semester
to be building their own web-based
database-backed application, that's
a pretty remarkable thing.
BRIAN YU: Yeah.
And one nice thing about just the
ability to showcase these projects
is not only are they showcasing them now
to other students and other attendees
at the fair, but because of what
the production team has now done,
there's also now this live
stream in recent years
where students can showcase
their projects to the world,
and people are interviewing
them and asking them questions,
and anyone online can go and see
what projects people are doing.
How long has that been around, and
what's the process for that like?
DAVID MALAN: Oh, that's
a really good question.
We've certainly been capturing
on video and camera, still shots,
memories of the fair from early on.
But in the past, let's say three or
four years, maybe, have we indeed
started live streaming the
whole event and turning it
into something akin
to the Olympics, where
you have roaming reporters
interviewing the athletes,
and in our case, the computer scientists
about their project on the floor.
And sort of multiplexing, toggling among
all of the different cameras and views.
It's typically hosted by one
or more members of the staff.
Colton Ogden, Veronica
Nutting, this most recent year,
and last year as well, who
kind of anchor the whole show.
And it's such fun to
flip through and watch
so many different angles of the
fair that you missed at the time.
We're talking an event now that draws,
amazingly, some 2,000-plus attendees,
typically, every year, not to
mention our own students presenting
their projects.
So even you as a human
attendee at this event
only barely scratch the surface
of everything that's going on,
and all the projects that are there,
and the conversations and demos.
So being able to
re-experience it on video,
or to be able to experience
it at all virtually
from wherever you are in the world
via the live streams on YouTube
and Facebook and the like
is really such a fun thing.
And it just gets prettier,
and better, and more and more
interactive thanks to
CS50's amazing team.
But it really is the
student's interviews
on these, and the demos on
their screens that really pop.
And actually, one thing we
did start doing a few years
prior to that was that we're expecting
of students, when they submit
their final projects, not just
their code and their documentation
and so forth, but also a
two- to five-minute video
that we asked them to upload
unlistedly to YouTube so that we then
have a visual demonstration.
And we ask students, of
course, if they want to opt
into allowing us to share these online.
So usually, most students allow us
to publish them in a gallery of sorts
online too.
And that's been fun too
to build up all the more
of this repository of now
hundreds-- thousands, really--
of students' final projects.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, that's always
great to see, especially
because the fair is relatively short.
It's a couple of hours
long, and so there's
no way you'd be able to have a complete
conversation with 800-plus students
that are all presenting
their projects during it.
So I always go back,
and I look at the video,
and sometimes there's a
project that's like, oh, wow, I
wish I had been able to go
see that one in more detail,
because there are just so many
cool and interesting things that
are happening there.
DAVID MALAN: Though I feel, on
behalf of our production team,
I should emphasize it's
not really couple of hours.
It's been at least
four hours most years,
and some years it's
probably been five or more.
But that too has been a
design detail that we've had
to figure out experimentally over time.
Even the first one was probably three
or four hours but broken into shifts.
I think we probably had students
presenting in groups of roughly 100
out of the 287 students, and presenting
for about 90 minutes at a time.
And we've changed that number.
Sometimes it's 90 minutes.
Sometimes it's been 80,
or 60 minutes, or 75.
At Yale, too, we played with
these numbers really based
on the hours during which we want to
run the event and the total numbers
of students.
But that helps us accommodate
even more students,
because we can't have
800 students all at once,
and I'm not sure we would want
to have everyone there at once.
You want attendees not presenting their
projects to chat up those presenting.
So playing with those
numbers has helped as well.
And there too, like
even fine-tuning things.
We've sometimes started
at 11:00 AM, or noon,
but of course, then you clobber lunch.
We've ended at like 4:30,
or 4:00 PM, and then people
start to check out at
the end of the day.
So we're trying to find the
sweet spot, and it's something
in the range of 11:00 to
4:00 seems to be best,
if not wrapping a little earlier.
We get critical mass.
BRIAN YU: And you
mentioned Yale as well.
So CS50 has been at Yale now for--
I think this is just its fifth year at
Yale that CS50's been offered there,
and we had a fair every single year.
How has the organizing the
fair there been different?
Because it's been interesting
to see how we've taken the fair,
which used to just exist for this
course, and now Yale does it.
And then [INAUDIBLE] CS50 teachers who
are teaching CS50 AP, like high school
versions of the class, that
have had their own fairs
at their own high schools with
their high school students
all presenting their projects to
other students, and other teachers,
and members of their communities.
So what does that look like,
and what goes into making
another fair other than our own?
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, really good question.
Fortunately, we essentially
had a playbook for Yale
in that we knew how to run a fair
and what knobs we could turn.
So it was mostly execution of that kind
of template, thanks to Jason Hirschhorn
early on with our very first
fair in a building at Yale
called Commons, which is this
beautiful space even grander
than Harvard's Annenberg Hall
where students would take meals.
Very Harry Potter-like, if
you're familiar with Hogwarts.
So we use that space and set up tables.
The tables were not bar
height there because we
had these old school beautiful wooden
tables that were normal height,
and we felt, OK, reasonable compromise.
Not everything needs
to be exactly the same.
We don't need to go rent tables
when we have tables here.
But we similarly invited some alumni,
and recruiters, and industry friends
to table for students there too.
Because of various
dining constraints there,
we haven't typically had the same food.
Instead of popcorn and
cotton candy in recent years,
we have cookies instead, so the
cuisine is a little different than New
Haven than Cambridge.
But for the most part, the structure
of the event is pretty much the same.
And in fact, we bring
a photo booth to Yale,
just like we have here, to allow
students to take memories home
with them.
And at the end of the day,
the most important detail
is just that the students
are there, and that there's
someone for them to chat with.
And so one thing that has worked
out well in recent years--
both in Cambridge at Harvard
and in New Haven at Yale--
is we've started inviting CS50's
high school audience, a.k.a.
CS50 AP.
So both at Harvard and Yale
do we have a few busloads
of high school or middle
school students coming
on field trips with their
teachers and parents
to come see our
undergraduates' final projects.
And that's been great too, because
it literally increases significantly
the number of people who are
there to chat up our own students.
The younger students are
often quite interested in what
they might do in college, let alone
in a place like Harvard or Yale.
So it's just all the better,
we hope, for our own students,
who then have all the more of a
genuine interest among passersby
in their projects.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, and some of the
high school students recently--
I remember in this most
recent CS50 Fair at Yale,
some of the high school students
had projects of their own
that they were showing off
and talking to people about.
And it was really cool to see the
kinds of stuff that they were doing.
I unfortunately never got to see
the Yale fair at the Commons, which
sounds like a beautiful space.
The first Yale fair that I remember--
I forget which year it was-- was
at like a museum or something.
And I remember the photobooth
had dinosaurs in the background,
and we were walking through these
museum exhibits and seeing projects.
And that was a fun space, just
something a little bit different--
DAVID MALAN: It was very weird, though.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, it was different.
DAVID MALAN: This was their
museum of natural history,
and there really were literal
dinosaur bones in the photographs
with the laptops and YouTube videos.
And it was this weird collision
of worlds between thousands
of years ago and modernity now, so.
But it was a beautiful space,
so that worked out well.
However, not unlike Northwest Science
at Harvard, that building-- the museum
was pretty far off campus.
So we've used the library.
We've used another
event space on campus.
But we're hoping this fall
that Commons will reopen.
It's been undergoing
renovations for a few years.
Don't know what it's going to
look like yet on the inside.
But we're hoping we can
return to a grander space,
especially now that we have
some 200-plus students at Yale,
so we kind of need the room to grow.
But as you say, even more amazing,
besides New Haven and Cambridge alike,
some of our communities online.
CS50x, so to speak, has been
building up their own CS50 fairs,
sometimes with advice
and direction from us,
but even more often, they're
just inspired by the photographs
that we've been posting from
CS50 Fairs at Harvard and Yale.
So most recently did some of
our friends and students in Iraq
have their own CS50x Iraq
fair, I think the first ever.
And they even duplicated
down to the level
of detail of getting the same emoji
balloons that we had here in Cambridge
that we have flying in the space.
So it was fascinating
seeing this parallel world
where students, who were similarly
proud of and had accomplished
their final projects, were showing them
off in a space very similar to ours,
with balloons very similar to ours,
with popcorn very similar to ours.
And it was quite flattering,
and just remarkable
to see what the students there who
were running this did with that vision
and made it their own.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, I remember
you sharing some of the photos
from that fair with me, and I remember
looking at some of the photos,
and for a split second,
almost thinking it
was our fair, because you see a bunch
of tables and a bunch of emoji balloons.
I'm like, I've never seen that
anywhere else other than CS50 Fair.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, for sure.
But I should emphasize too, balloons
are relatively easy to procure,
though the helium element isn't
ideal, but of course, that's
what helps it fill the
space literally, vertically.
But the origins of the fair
itself, I should emphasize, really
were much, much more modest.
2007 of CS50, there was no fair.
And there was instead more traditional
final project presentations.
So before your time, we had that
year some 200, 300 students as well.
And in fact, it might have
been 287 that first year,
and then like 332 the second
year, but same order of magnitude.
And we had reserved a whole
bunch of small rooms on campus,
and all of our teaching
fellows, or TFs, would
lead their sections or
recitations of 10 to 20 students
through a tour of
everyone's final project.
So you, if you were a student, would
stand up for maybe five minutes
and present your final project, then
the next student, then the next student.
And I as the instructor that year
tried to bounce around these rooms
as best I could, but I physically
and temporally could not
visit all of the rooms.
And even the students and
the TFs who were there,
I don't think they
were all very inspired.
It was kind of boring.
It was kind of a rote requirement that
you be there, listen to your classmates
present their final project.
Ans while I'm sure there was some
inspiration, there was no uptempo.
There was no inspiration.
There was no casual chitchat.
It really was formal.
And so that's what we tore down in 2008.
We got rid of what no one really wanted
to do-- everyone was really just going
through these motions to
present their final project--
and tried to turn it into something fun.
I myself never tended a
middle school science fair,
but we turned it into what I assumed
a middle school science fair was like,
with everyone presenting
their work at some sort,
and we definitely
added our own elements.
But that was the motivation.
But we beta tested the CS50 Fair in
some form at Harvard Extension School.
So I, and now you, have been teaching at
Harvard Extension School for some time,
our Continuing Ed program.
And for a couple of our software-based
classes that also culminated in final
projects, we introduced a
mini CS50 Fair very early on--
I believe before our 2008 CS50 Fair--
that just brought the students together,
those who were local to Cambridge,
in a small room on campus.
But we didn't do it with formal
presentations, like in 2007.
We instead went to CVS, local
convenience store and pharmacy,
picked up some Entenmann's
cake, which are
these boxed-up cakes that you can get in
some supermarkets and some convenience
stores.
And we got some plastic knives,
and I think we got milk.
We got some cups with milk for
some delicious chocolate cake.
And just turned on some music.
And we laid out the tables,
got rid of the chairs,
and just invited the students-- our
extension students those terms--
to come in, set up their laptops
with power cords, wherever,
and just kind of roam about a room.
And honestly, that had a
different vibe to be sure.
Much smaller scale, but no less
proud, and no less accomplished.
Just bringing people
together more casually
to delight in what they've done
and what each other had done
is all it really takes.
So truly, the lower bound here for
a very successful CS50-like Fair
is just some Entenmann's cakes.
I don't think you even need the
milk, because we've nixed that since.
And some music too, I
think, to fill in the gaps
and grease the social context with
some music is a good thing too.
Uptempo, not something somber.
BRIAN YU: So yeah, I was about
to ask about that, the music.
Who picks the playlist?
I've always wondered about that.
So I know there is like
a CS50 Fair playlist,
and someone presses
play on that playlist.
Where'd all those songs come from?
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, so a friend
of mine who gives me haircuts
actually had, in his own
salon many years ago,
some really cool uptempo hip
fashion-like music playing.
And I think this was
before the days of Shazam,
so I couldn't just take out my
phone and figure out what it was.
So I asked him what it was.
And he and his husband kindly
put together a mix CD of music
that we then played in
MP3 format or something
like that at the first CS50 Fair.
And what was characteristic
of it was that it was
music that didn't really have lyrics.
It was mostly just sounds
and a lot of uptempo beats
that really was conducive to
keeping the blood pumping,
and the conversations going, and
just keeping the energy level up.
And so for a couple of years, I
think we used those soundtracks.
I think sometime after that, I
was at a conference or an event--
Google I/O, I think, which is
Google's annual input output
conference for techies.
And they had played really
cool music that one year when
everyone would come up onto the stage.
And so I actually went and
chatted with the AV technicians,
figured out who their
DJ was, and he kindly
sent me a copy of the very music they
had used for their own conference.
So we used that music
for a year or two since.
Since then, Spotify came
into existence, and so did
Colton Ogden, formerly of this podcast.
And he would DJ and pick
songs out from Spotify.
And most recently,
this year, I think I--
I always describe the
kind of music that I
like for the event as fashion
show music, or the kind of music
you'd see in a cool clothing store,
really, and that's just playing
and you feel like
you're in a cool place.
So I think I literally just
searched on Spotify this year
for fashion show music.
And sure enough, there's this
massive playlist that you could use.
So that's what we used--
BRIAN YU: There's Spotify
playlists for just about anything.
You search up any occasion,
any genre, any mood you want,
and there's a Spotify playlist
that someone's compiled for you.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, and you know,
because we've shared with our own CS50
account some of our own playlists, you
can probably search for CS50 Fair music
and even find an answer to that question
now too, though of course, someone
needs to put it there, so.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, that's good to know.
And I really do think
the music does have
the effect of keeping the energy up and
really encouraging these conversations.
And I think that's the
distinguishing feature
of the CS50 Fair from the 2007-style
presentations you were talking about.
This is just much more conversational.
It's all about just getting students
to talk about their projects
with other people that
are interested in it,
and having the
opportunity to share that,
and talk about the work they've done in
just a semester of time in the class.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, yeah, it
really isn't a resource question
to this day with our
Extension School courses,
which are smaller scale in
terms of numbers of students.
We still just pick up some
Entenmann's cakes, like literally ,
from CVS or the like, and get people
together with some nice music, no milk,
but just some tables and invite
students to bring their laptops.
And those are just as
successful, so it really
doesn't take all of the
balloons and spectacle.
It really just takes the
people, at the end of the day.
And again, making it more of a
community social inspirational event,
and not a presentational event,
I think is the key distinction.
BRIAN YU: Yeah, I think
that's worked really well,
and it's been a lot of fun
for me as a staff member,
and I think for students
as well, just to be
a part of that kind of experience,
because it's definitely
a memorable one.
DAVID MALAN: That, then, is the CS50
Fair, and this was the CS50 podcast.
My name is David Malan.
BRIAN YU: My name is Brian Yu.
DAVID MALAN: And if
you'd like to reach out
with any suggestions or requests
for future podcast episodes,
do as always email us at
podcast@cs50.harvard.edu.
BRIAN YU: Talk to you next time.
