UCL hosts first-ever CS50 Hackathon London

On Friday 27th May more than 120 students gathered at UCL Institute of Education for the first-ever CS50 Hackathon London.

CS50 is Harvard University's introductory course in computer science that's also freely available online via edx.org. In the last years, the course has gained immense popularity around the world through its offering as a MOOC and is now not only taught at Harvard but also at Yale University. While CS50 has run hackathons at both universities and in other cities in the US, this is the first time they have come across the pond to hold a hackathon.

The latter provided students with an opportunity to dive into problem sets or projects alongside classmates, Harvard CS50’s staff, and UCLU TechSoc’s team.

Students who came to the event hailed from all over Europe, with attendees coming from the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, and Czech Republic and one person even flying in from Chile!

The idea for the event was not to run a competition but to give each attendee an opportunity to learn something new by solving problems collaboratively. Students worked on problems sets or their own projects but also had a chance to learn from walkthroughs held by CS50 staff members and an introduction to machine learning workshop by Microsoft. To round things off, everyone had a chance to take home some snapshots from the photo booth, which you may find here and here.

The event organisers would like to thank the Department of Computer Science and Microsoft for sponsoring the event. Furthermore, we would like to thank the CS50 team, Richard Noss, Michael Walker, ChangeMakers, Digital Education, and Rae Harbird for their support.

The team who worked tirelessly to make this event possible include: Tobias Büschel, Kok-Pin Chi, Pranav Nashikkar, Sachchit Prasad, Marco Greselin, Shanice Ong, Matthew Bell, Fraser Savage, Wilhelm Klopp, Vicky Dineshchandra and Daniel Gavrilov.