CS50 IDE – Online IDE for Students and Teachers

Thanks for the feedback! The main reason why we use GitHub sign in is that all CS50 students need a GitHub account to submit their work and use other CS50 tools anyway and that makes it easier for them to get started with the CS50 IDE. We might support other ways to sign in in the future though.

userbinator3• 7 years ago

is that all CS50 students need a GitHub account to submit their work

Have you considered the privacy and ethical implications of the obligatory use of a third-party service (with its own policies on privacy and PII) for a course?

I know GitHub may be seen by most in a better light, but to me this is as treacherous as obligatory use of Google or Facebook services for courses.

(I've worked in the CS education sector, but where students submitted work --- and worked on --- the institution's own servers.)

delinka3• 7 years ago

This application will be able to read your private email addresses.

Why do you need this?

kzidane11• 7 years ago

For communication purposes.

delinka3• 7 years ago

Why do you need to communicate with me before I even get a chance to demo the app?

andkenneth• 7 years ago

Cool little simplified IDE. Great for teaching first concepts which is what CS50 is. It would be cool if we could have an instance in other cloud regions, otherwise the terminal is a bit laggy for my liking in NZ.

kzidane11• 7 years ago

It's likely that we'll support other regions in the future.

wyclif2• 7 years ago

It's currently down for me on the latest Chrome.

delinka3• 7 years ago

Doesn't render anything in Safari after I authorize it "to read [my] private email addresses."

kzidane11• 7 years ago

Unfortunately this is a known issue on Safari because it doesn't support certain headers that AWS uses. We're working with the Cloud9 team to resolve this asap though.

freehunter• 7 years ago

Please please please get the Cloud9 dev team to resolve this! There has been an issue open for over 3.5 years now [1] on the pre-AWS C9 and 1.5 years on the AWS support forums [2] and the main reaction from the C9 devs seems to alternate between "this is Apple's fault" and "wait what browser does iOS use again?".

Very frustrating that this is a web app and they can't make it work in one of the most-used browsers of all time. iOS13 even uses the full desktop Safari engine and it still won't load.

[1] https://community.c9.io/t/mobile-support-phone-tablet-ipad-p...

[2] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=270292

aiansiti• 7 years ago

Upvote if you too like ripping phone books in half!

randartie• 7 years ago

This is mostly powered by amazon cloud9, which is really cool in itself. https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/

cyberferret• 7 years ago

We use Cloud9 here quite a lot, with great results. I was going to ask what was the differentiator between this and Cloud9, but judging from your post, I am assuming it is a 'cut down' version of C9 with a lot of the bells and whistles removed?

So I assume that it spins up a micro EC2 instance each time someone wants to use CS50?

kzidane11• 7 years ago

I am assuming it is a 'cut down' version of C9 with a lot of the bells and whistles removed?

In a way, yes. The CS50 IDE mainly targets students or teachers who are taking or teaching CS50 (https://cs50.harvard.edu/) or similar introductory courses. The UI is simplified in a try to be more accessible to users with little or no prior CS or programming experience. It also comes preloaded with a bunch of tools and libraries that are used in these courses so that users don't have to deal with the hassle of installing and configuring them and instead focus more on the course actually tries to teach.

So I assume that it spins up a micro EC2 instance each time someone wants to use CS50?

It's actually backed by containers rather.

nickysielicki• 7 years ago

As much as I would hate the idea as a student, online IDEs that fully record the progression of a CS assignment could go a very long way in preventing cheating in CS coursework. That's a decent startup idea.

raegis2• 7 years ago

This already exists. The Moodle VPL plugin I use has transparent version control.

acbart• 7 years ago

Man, VPL is the weirdest combination of old and new. It works, though, I'll give it credit for that.

Aeolun2• 7 years ago

How would that address people working on their local machine and then pasting in the working solution?

I know I personally wouldn’t want to work with a crippled online editor when I have a perfectly good IDE on my desktop.

userbinator3• 7 years ago

I've been a TA and taught introductory CS courses, and IMHO trying to "add extra tech" tends to get in the way of learning more than anything else, as well as perpetuating bad habits when programming. I don't think giving beginners an "IDE addiction" is a good way to start them off, and believe that intro CS should begin away from a computer: designing with pencil and paper (or a whiteboard) and "thinking before doing" gives students a chance to exercise their brains instead of relying on a stupid "mechanical brain" to hand-hold them.

Then again, the "old school" (literally) way is not as "fashionable" as "look at all the cool tech we're using in education".

bsder2• 7 years ago

I've been a TA and taught introductory CS courses, and IMHO trying to "add extra tech" tends to get in the way of learning more than anything else, as well as perpetuating bad habits when programming.

I don't have a good suggestion for intro classes. Basically, everything has downsides. Some people don't want to interact with a computer; some people want to do mega-cool things on the computer; some people don't understand what is going on and will be confused by any extraneous steps. Anything you do is going to consume time and displease somebody.

I can tell you that for sophomore and up CS classes in college, use real stuff. It's a pain to set up and maintain (although it might be easier nowadays), but the students will thank you for it afterward. I made my students use Eclipse and Subversion at the time (I would probably use VSCode and Mercurial nowadays) and had a continuous integration server running every time I gave an assignment. Students could use an IDE or editor other than Eclipse, but I warned them that I might not be able to help them about IDE specific things. Subversion was they way that they could "submit the code" so the continuous integration server would test it.

Even students who gave negative feedback about aspects of the class gave positive feedback about using the "real" tools and not stupid submission systems like Blackboard or its ilk. All of the students noted that they did much better interviewing for jobs than students who didn't have experience with the real tools.

Although, it was funny getting shocked responses from students who interviewed with employers that didn't use source control. Brainwash them early for best results. :)

userbinator3• 7 years ago

Students could use an IDE or editor other than Eclipse, but I warned them that I might not be able to help them about IDE specific things.

I had a similar policy, although perhaps directly opposed: I supported only vi(m) or Notepad use, but as long as the source was plaintext (either CRLF or LF line endings, but not a mix...), any editor was allowed. Also, they could use MSVC or other C compilers, but the assignments must work on the course servers with GCC (which students could SSH into and work from, as well as where they handed in.) IMHO starting with a "heavy" IDE like Eclipse or VS just furthers the notion that useful software must necessarily be big and complex, or that such software is obligatory to development; not really a good thing to instill in beginners if we want them to be mindful of efficiency in the future.

est31• 7 years ago

Then again, the "old school" (literally) way is not as "fashionable" as "look at all the cool tech we're using in education"

In fact, rich schools are trending away from computers and digital media towards analog ones.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/digital-divide-scre...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309327

disconcision• 7 years ago

this is an interesting one. i've definitely heard and entertained serious arguments that a CS education shouldn't even involve touching computers period for the first n years. it's certainly not something i dismiss out of hand.

personally I was turned off by programming as a kid, due in part to what I perceived to be a suffusion of hoops to jump through due to brittle, ugly, and unexplorable interfaces. in adulthood i was re-exposed to an improved tooling situation, and now i'm a professional programmer, actively working on (debatably yet better) tooling which at least a few other people seem to appreciate.

my current position is that different people want different things out of programming and computing in general, and that both of those are sufficiently abstract to accommodate different approaches. there is for sure a continuing need for people who are willing and able to run software in their head/whiteboard, but I also feel there are many others who could be making meaningful contributions but are turned off by the textural and tactile quality of 'computing as applied mathematics' which no longer encompasses the breath of the discipline.

markus_zhang2• 7 years ago

I don't think a whiteboard contradicts with an IDE. The students can always design the programs on paper (I do this) step by step, including the notes, and then write the programs in one run without bug.

Aeolun2• 7 years ago

I started out writing code with an IDE (Eclipse at the time I believe) and I don’t think it’s a replacement for thinking about your code at all.

The only thing it helps you with is not having to think about mindless documentation seaching, like what functions can I call on ‘String’.

rorykoehler• 7 years ago

I agree. I did cs50 and also rails tutorial when I learnt to code. At the time rails tutorial used a normal text editor but it seems learning to set up a proper dev env was too much for many and now it uses some cloud ide. This is a step backwards. Setting up your system correctly is a critical pro skill. It's the first thing I learn when diving into a new language.

raegis2• 7 years ago

Is the code open? Can I put this on my own server?

kzidane11• 7 years ago

An older version of version of the Cloud9 core SDK is open source at https://github.com/c9/core. Instructions for downloading an older offline version of the CS50 IDE are available at https://cs50.readthedocs.io/ide/offline. Unfortunately the new versions are not open source at the time of this writing.

markus_zhang2• 7 years ago

Somehow I cannot access the website since a few days ago. It just spins and says "Preparing your environment" but never loads the IDE.

wyclif2• 7 years ago

Same. I'm guessing it's getting the HN hug of death.

kzidane11• 7 years ago

Could you please report the issue to sysadmins@cs50.harvard.edu? Thanks!

houzertuch• 7 years ago

Is this out of UC Davis? There was a fellow working on something like this over there a few years ago

raphaelrk• 7 years ago

This IDE was one of my favorite parts of the class.

You open it in a tab and immediately have an ubuntu instance + file system + terminal + text editor running. It has an excellent GUI, it's fast, if you mess up horribly you can just close your tab and restart the instance, and it's a standard environment for all the students which makes teaching assistants' jobs easier. It's so convenient I've used it instead of my own computer at times.

For more context, the class almost immediately dives into C and later gets into web programming, and being able to open up a tab, create `hello.c`, `CTRL-s`, `make hello`, `./hello`, or quickly run a publically-facing webserver is a great combo of convenient, simple, and realistic. The class used to use a VM which was much more of a hassle to set up, a lot slower, and overall not as nice of an experience. When being taken by 800 students a year at Harvard and hundreds of thousands a year online, that change alone has probably introduced a lot of people to programming.

CS50 IDE – Online IDE for Students and Teachers

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