[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.