On Friday 27th May 2016, UCL in conjunction with Harvard, ran the first ever CS50 Hackathon outside of the US. The event was held at the Institute of Education, a short walk from UCL’s main campus where more than 120 students had gathered for this exciting event.

At this point, some of you might be wondering what exactly is CS50? CS50 is Harvard’s introductory course for computer science which you can take for free at edx.org. Over the years, the course has grown in popularity globally and apart from Harvard, is also being taught at Yale University. CS50 has seen hackathons around the US, however this was the first time they had decided to hop across the pond and hold one in London.

The actual event itself had a fantastic atmosphere, as the all the attendees filtered in, they were greeted by music and a wonderful venue where they soon delved into the CS50 problem sets while others had decided to work on their own personal projects. The attendees varied from professors and teachers to university students, many of whom had hailed from all over Europe. There were some who had never before attended a hackathon and wanted to come to see what the atmosphere was like and all of them had expressed just how relaxed and fun the entire event had been for them.

There was a photo booth where people often went when they wanted to take a break or just wanted to take a couple of silly photos with each other. There were plenty of snacks and food and the whole event was meant to be a fun and relaxing 6 hour period.

Everyone loved taking pictures at the photo-booth!

CS50 was not a competition but instead was all about collaboration, it was about working together to try and solve a problem set and in the process learn something new. On top of this, CS50 staff had also run a couple of workshops and Microsoft had an Introduction to Machine Learning workshop, all of which helped to try and expose the attendees something new and different. It was great to see so many people who had never met before come together to try solve the problem sets or those who were working on personal projects showing them to others who were curious to see what they had made. ­­

It was refreshing to speak to a particular attendee when he told us that he had never been to such an event before and had traveled all the way to see what it was all about. He enjoyed the atmosphere where everyone was happy to share ideas and help each other out. They were studying another subject but really had a passion for tech and wanted to get into it more through meeting others at such events and it was great to see how much people were enjoying themselves.

We would like to thank everyone involved for helping to host such a splendid event, from the attendees, the CS50 staff from Harvard, staff from IoE and also all of the members from UCLU TechSoc who worked tirelessly throughout the day to make the hackathon possible.

We hope to see you again at the next CS50 coming next year which will be even bigger!

Here are some of the tweets from the event!