David Malan

And also, it's a filter from the get-go.

I mean, these admissions departments are already identifying strengths among people, and sort of the audience you then end up with is very similar along certain axes, certainly along academic abilities and whatnot.

But the value of places like Harvard, I do think, has long been

The networking opportunities, the connections you make, the life experiences you might have in academics, sometimes to a fault, like is often secondary.

But when it comes to knowledge and learning outcomes and practical skills, I mean, I'd like to think that you're getting as good, if not better, an experience taking a class like CS50 online, if only for the simple technological reasons that you can.

pause and fast forward and rewind and open multiple tabs, go down this intellectual rabbit holes in ways that a traditional campus is just not designed to support unless those same students are taking the class in their dorm rooms or at home like during COVID.

Pointers.

And that was true for me 30 years ago, so much so that I'm always very weirdly excited to tell students in class nowadays that I still remember where I was on campus the day I finally got pointers.

And I'll share here, I was in one of the dining halls on campus with my teaching fellow, RTF, who himself was...

A student, probably one or two, one or two years older than me.

We were sitting at the back of the dining hall on these wooden tables and this beautiful old school sort of Harvard desk room.

And somehow or other, something he said that day after weeks of struggling, that light bulb went off for me.

And I'm like, oh, it's just an address.

Right.

which you know never quite clicked even though i'm sure many people tried to hammer that into me previous to that but it's just hard like memory stuff is hard especially if computers to students from the get-go is very much this black box this abstraction itself um to really go down to that level takes some some new thinking and it took me a while

My instinct is to say metaphors or what we more broadly call memorable moments where it's a phone book where you're trying to teach binary search or even a screenshot of the iOS context app where you're trying to introduce the same algorithm.

It's during COVID, for instance, we worked with a local theater and we had seven physical doors on a stage that were from previous plays that they had put on.

And we put

fuzzy little numbers behind that the prop shop had kindly developed for us so that we could play that same game of using not lockers, but physical doors.

And creating those binary doors for students, I think, helps them latch onto a visual that makes a very esoteric topic that, frankly, who really cares about binary search day to day, just kind of come alive.