This is CS50 AP 2019–2020
Here’s what’s new for the upcoming school year for CS50 AP! Similar to last summer, we had some undergrads from CS50 at Harvard join us in Cambridge to create and update some of the tools and resources listed below, and we think there’s a lot of great stuff in here for you and your students!
Table of Contents
Curriculum Changes and Updates
CS50 IDE
Check50
submit.cs50.io
man.cs50.io
CS50 Puzzle Day Kits
Staffing Changes
Questions
Curriculum Changes and Updates
CS50 AP 2019–2020 will now reflect the changes from Fall 2018 at Harvard. The ap.cs50.school website is updated with the appropriate resources for the chapters. We’ve decided to modularize CS50 AP such that the curriculum is composed of two portions:
- CS50 Core Curriculum, which is all of the resources we make available to students in the fall
- AP Modules, which include topics that are not covered in CS50 here on campus, but are essential to the AP Computer Science Principles Course.
Each chapter page on ap.cs50.school contains links to the problems for that corresponding week, along with slides, videos (lectures and shorts), notes, and source code from that lecture. Source code is distributed in lecture using a tool called Sandbox, which you can you use in your own classrooms too! Check out our post on Sandbox for more information.
With the updates from Fall 2018, CS50 AP now has two additional problems, Survey and Bleep!
CS50 IDE
CS50 IDE is a cloud-based Integrated Development Environment powered by AWS Cloud9 that features a cloud-based Ubuntu environment, a browser-based editor that supports syntax highlighting and word completion, a GUI-based GDB debugging, themes, customizable layouts, keyboard shortcuts, and many more features. Since it’s cloud-based, you can continue working on your problem sets even if you use a different computer! This version of the IDE is essentially the same as the one you’ve used in the past, albeit it with a GitHub login. This means that students no longer need to create edX accounts to access the IDE. All logins for CS50 tools will be via GitHub credentials.
Check50
Check50 has been updated to make it even easier to write custom checks! For the most part these changes do not affect usage for you and your students. The only major difference is that slugs, or the unique identifiers we use for the problems will be prefixed with cs50/problems/2019/ap instead of cs50/2019/ap. For more information on writing your own checks, visit https://cs50.readthedocs.io/projects/check50/en/latest/extension_writer.html#extension-writer.
submit.cs50.io
submit.cs50.io is CS50’s new tool for managing student submissions online, and will serve as the replacement for cs50.me, a site many of you previously used for managing your courses. Though students technically submit their code to GitHub, students and teachers need not be familiar with Git itself to be able to take advantage of CS50’s submission system!
The workflow is essentially the same for you and your students. You’ll visit https://submit.cs50.io/courses/new to create a new course and then distribute your join link to your students so that you are able to view their work. You’ll be able to download any data from cs50.me by visiting legacy.cs50.me and downloading course data as usual. If your course is too large to do this via the web UI, email ap@cs50.harvard.edu. For a screencast on how to use the new platform and more information on submit.cs50.io, visit https://medium.com/@cs50/cs50s-new-submission-tools-for-teachers-and-students-e18f357076f7.
man.cs50.io
man.cs50.io is the new site for simplified documentation of man pages for C libraries used in CS50. This site replaces what was reference.cs50.net. Just like reference.cs50.net, this site contains information about the usage, return values, and examples for each function in the CS50 library along with other commonly used C libraries.
CS50 Puzzle Day Kits
The start of a new school year means one thing at CS50 AP, Puzzle Day! Every year our summer team puts together 150+ Puzzle Day Kits for CS50 AP teachers to host their own Puzzle Day at their own school. If you’d like to receive a Puzzle Day kit, fill out the Google Form: https://forms.gle/w4K3k4bqCKYZjf7H8. The first batch of kits will be mailed out by the end of August. Those requesting a kit to an address outside of the U.S. should please use a U.S.-based mail forwarding service or, if not possible, coordinate with ap@cs50.harvard.edu to cover shipping before submitting this form. Requests must be received by September 6th. Our in-house music expert, Colton Ogden, has also put together a Spotify playlist for this event, which can be found at cs50.ly/puzzle-music.
Staffing Changes
Lastly, on a less curricular-focused and more personal note, I’ve recently taken on a new role outside of CS50. To that end, I will no longer be handling day-to-day involvement with managing this program. Rest assured though that I will remain involved with CS50 AP and will continue to work for its success, just in a slightly different capacity than I have up until now.
Questions
If there are any questions at all about anything you’ve seen in this newsletter or anything else, please reach out — you can reach the AP team by contacting ap@cs50.harvard.edu; this includes if you want to reach out to us because you’d like to get involved in the CS50 AP program for the first time… perhaps this school year!
