Odds are we've all used (or tried!) quite a few tools to facilitate efficiency inside and outside of the classroom and empower students to learn more effectively, whether on campus or off. Some of those tools are perhaps homegrown and unique to one's own institution, but freely available educational technologies abound as well, some in the cloud, some for Macs and PCs, some open-source. And quite a few commercial tools offer free or discounted educational plans as well. In this BoF, we'll begin with a whirlwind tour of the tools we ourselves use, including AI, identifying the problems they solve and how well, then quickly open the floor to everyone to share their favorites as well. Along the way, we'll jot down every tool mentioned and share the results. With educational technology an evergreen landscape, this year's list will surely be different from last! Attendees should exit this session with a better understanding of the current landscape, familiarized with innovations they can bring back to their own classes (whether high school, undergraduate, or graduate), without reinventing wheels themselves.

CS50.dev is a cloud-based programming environment offered to students taking CS50 and other CS courses at Harvard University, both on-campus or online. Built atop GitHub Codespaces, CS50.dev simplifies the initial challenges commonly faced by students and instructors because of the complexities involved in setting up programming environments at term's start. This demo offers an in-depth exploration of CS50.dev's architecture and presents a detailed guide on customizing Docker images and development container (devcontainers) to meet the specific needs of courses within GitHub Codespaces. The demo will also provide general guidance on how to help students transition from CS50.dev to using VS Code independently on their local machines at the term's end.

Teaching computer science at scale can be challenging. From our experience in CS50, Harvard University's introductory course, we've seen firsthand the impactful role that generative artificial intelligence can play in education. Recognizing its potential and stakes, we integrated OpenAI's GPT into our own teaching methodology. The goal was to emulate a 1:1 teacher-to-student ratio, incorporating "pedagogical guardrails" to maintain instructional integrity. The result was a personalized, AI-powered bot in the form of a friendly rubber duck aimed at delivering instructional responses and troubleshooting without giving outright solutions. We plan to share our journey and offer insights into responsibly harnessing AI in educational settings. Participants will gain hands-on experience working with GPT through OpenAI's APIs, understanding and crafting prompts, answering questions using embedding-based search, and finally, building their own AI chatbot. Ultimately, we'll not only share lessons learned from our own approach but also equip educators hands-on with the knowledge and tools with which they, too, can implement these technologies in their unique teaching environments.

In Summer 2023, we developed and integrated a suite of AI-based software tools into CS50 at Harvard University. These tools were initially available to approximately 70 summer students, then to thousands of students online, and finally to several hundred on campus during Fall 2023. Per the course's own policy, we encouraged students to use these course-specific tools and limited the use of commercial AI software such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and the new Bing. Our goal was to approximate a 1:1 teacher-to-student ratio through software, thereby equipping students with a pedagogically-minded subject-matter expert by their side at all times, designed to guide students toward solutions rather than offer them outright. The tools were received positively by students, who noted that they felt like they had "a personal tutor.'' Our findings suggest that integrating AI thoughtfully into educational settings enhances the learning experience by providing continuous, customized support and enabling human educators to address more complex pedagogical issues. In this paper, we detail how AI tools have augmented teaching and learning in CS50, specifically in explaining code snippets, improving code style, and accurately responding to curricular and administrative queries on the course's discussion forum. Additionally, we present our methodological approach, implementation details, and guidance for those considering using these tools or AI generally in education.

CS50.ai is an AI-based educational tool developed and integrated into CS50 at Harvard University using large language models (LLMs), supporting both in-person and online learners. CS50.ai encapsulates a variety of AI-based tools designed to enhance students' learning by approximating a 1:1 teacher-to-student ratio. We showcase: "Explain Highlighted Code," a Visual Studio (VS) Code extension that provides just-in-time explanations of code snippets; style50, a VS Code extension that offers formatting suggestions and explanations thereof; and our "CS50 Duck," an AI-based chatbot for course-related questions, implemented both as a VS Code extension and as a standalone web application. We also demonstrate the integration of our tools into Ed, the course's discussion forum. This demo will illustrate the functionality and effectiveness of these tools as well as the pedagogical "guardrails" that we put in place to ensure secure and fair usage of these tools, while sharing insights from our own experience therewith this past summer and fall.

For CS50 at Harvard, we have long provided students with a standardized programming environment, to avoid start-of-term technical difficulties that might otherwise arise if students had to install and configure compilers, interpreters, and debuggers on their own Macs and PCs. (For many students, "hello, world" is challenge enough on day 0, without also encountering "command not found" at the same time!) We originally provided students with shell accounts on a university-managed cluster of systems. We then transitioned to a cloud-based equivalent so as to manage the systems ourselves, root access and all. We transitioned thereafter to client-side virtual machines, to scale to more students and enable GUI-based assignments. We have since transitioned to web-based environments, complete with code tabs, terminal windows, and file explorers, initially implemented atop AWS Cloud9 and now, most recently, GitHub Codespaces, an implementation of Visual Studio (VS) Code in the cloud, free for teachers and students alike. In this workshop, we'll discuss the pedagogical and technological advantages and disadvantages of every approach and focus most of our time, hands-on, on using and configuring GitHub Codespaces itself for teaching and learning. Along the way, attendees will learn how to create their own Docker images and "devcontainers" for their own classes and any languages they teach. Attendees will learn what is possible educationally by writing their own VS Code extensions as well. And how, at term's end, to "offboard" students to VS Code itself on their own Macs and PCs, so as to continue programming independent of Codespaces.

As CS enrollments have grown and professors have increased their reliance upon undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs), it has become all the more important to identify strategies that equip TAs to assist students with coursework while providing the best learning experience during teaching sessions. In this lightning talk, we present a strategy consisting of clarifying and probing questions that highlight the importance of equipping students with tools to solve computer science problems on their own, instead of seeking help from the teaching staff every time they face a challenge. Toward this end, we will share a guide that we adopted during TA training for Harvard University's introductory course, CS50. Additionally, we will share scenarios in which such strategies might be most useful, as during group tutorials or one-on-one office hours. Lastly, we will share preliminary findings on how the strategies can not only benefit a student during the time when a TA is helping them but also equip them with skills to solve such problems on their own.

This workshop introduces participants hands-on to GitHub Classroom, a free, web-based application that enables teachers to distribute, collect, and autograde programming assignments in any language. GitHub Classroom effectively provides an abstraction layer atop Git and GitHub, automating tasks for students and teachers that would otherwise be time-consuming and tedious via a CLI or GUI, particularly for larger courses. To distribute an assignment, a teacher need only create a "repository" with starter code (and optional tests) in their own "organization" on GitHub, which students can then "accept," automatically creating within that same organization a copy thereof to which the student has write access. To submit work, students need only upload (or push) files to the same, which automates execution of any tests. Students' submissions (and the results of any such tests) are then accessible via the teacher's own dashboard. GitHub Classroom does not strictly require familiarity with Git of students and teachers; basic operations can be performed via GitHub's GUI. But some comfort with cloning, adding, committing, and pushing files with Git itself is ideal. By workshop's end, participants will be prepared to use GitHub Classroom in their own courses if they so choose. And by way of GitHub Classroom can participants' students acquire all the more comfort with Git itself by courses' end.

Odds are we've all used (or tried!) quite a few tools to facilitate efficiency inside and outside of the classroom and empower students to learn more effectively, whether on campus or off. Some of those tools are perhaps homegrown and unique to one's own institution, but freely available educational technologies abound as well, some in the cloud, some for Macs and PCs, some open-source. And quite a few commercial tools offer free or discounted educational plans as well. In this BoF, we'll begin with a whirlwind tour of the tools we ourselves use, identifying the problems they solve and how well, then quickly open the floor to everyone to share their favorites as well. Along the way, we'll jot down every tool mentioned and share the results. With educational technology an evergreen landscape, this year's list will surely be different from last! Attendees should exit this session with a better understanding of the current landscape, familiarized with innovations they can bring back to their own classes (whether high school, undergraduate, or graduate), without reinventing wheels themselves.

For CS50 at Harvard, we have long provided students with a standardized programming environment, to avoid start-of-term technical difficulties that might otherwise arise if students had to install and configure compilers, interpreters, and debuggers on their own Macs and PCs. (For many students, "hello, world" is challenge enough on day 0, without also encountering "command not found" at the same time!) We originally provided students with shell accounts on a university-managed cluster of systems. We then transitioned to a cloud-based equivalent so as to manage the systems ourselves, root access and all. We transitioned thereafter to client-side virtual machines, to scale to more students and enable GUI-based assignments. We have since transitioned to web-based environments, complete with code tabs, terminal windows, and file explorers, initially implemented atop AWS Cloud9 and now, most recently, GitHub Codespaces, an implementation of Visual Studio (VS) Code in the cloud, free for teachers and students alike. In this workshop, we'll discuss the pedagogical and technological advantages and disadvantages of every approach and focus most of our time, hands-on, on using and configuring GitHub Codespaces itself for teaching and learning. Along the way, attendees will learn how to create their own Docker images and "devcontainers" for their own classes and any languages they teach. Attendees will learn what is possible educationally by writing their own VS Code extensions as well. And how, at term's end, to "offboard" students to VS Code itself on their own Macs and PCs, so as to continue programming independent of Codespaces.

As computer science courses grow, instructors may find it increasingly difficult to meet all learners where they are, offering more-experienced students appropriate challenge and less-experienced students sufficient support to become more experienced themselves. In this lightning talk, we present how we've differentiated the instruction and assignments in CS50, Harvard University's introductory course for majors and non-majors, to support the growing variability we see in students' comfort with computer science. We share how we group students in sections according to their comfort levels, with additional support for those less comfortable in the form of smaller sections. We also share how we designed the course's problem sets for less-comfortable and more-comfortable students alike, ensuring both groups have adequately challenging "floors" and "ceilings" [1]. Our future work includes strengthening support for students who identify as "least comfortable," whose secondary schools might not have prepared them for studies in computer science or college more generally. We also plan to address questions about assessing students of varying comfort levels, which we presently accomplish through score normalization across comfort levels.

Odds are we've all used (or tried!) quite a few tools to facilitate efficiency inside and outside of the classroom and empower students to learn more effectively, whether on campus or off. Some of those tools are perhaps homegrown and unique to one's own institution, but freely available educational technologies abound as well, some in the cloud, some for Macs and PCs, some open-source. And quite a few commercial tools offer free or discounted educational plans as well. In this BoF, we'll begin with a whirlwind tour of the tools we ourselves use, identifying the problems they solve and how well, then quickly open the floor to everyone to share their favorites as well. Along the way, we'll jot down every tool mentioned and share the results. With educational technology an evergreen landscape, this year's list will surely be different from last! Attendees should exit this session with a better understanding of the current landscape, familiarized with innovations they can bring back to their own classes (whether high school, undergraduate, or graduate), without reinventing wheels themselves.