Harvard’s famed CS50 course is back in the UK in 2025-26 with 4 options for you to enjoy:
- CS50 UK Puzzle Day at Meta London – 10th October 2025
- CS50 at Oxford University (Online – 12 weeks) – course starts Monday 29th September 2025
- CS50 at Oxford University (In-person – 12 weeks) – January 2026
- CS50 at Oxford University (Online – 22 weeks) – January 2026
CS50 Puzzle Day at Meta London
CS50 is back in the United Kingdom! Join us in London on Friday, October 10, 2025, for a CS50x Puzzle Day with the University of Oxford and Meta, with Professor David J. Malan from Harvard, Professor Daniel Wilson from Oxford, Dr Tom Crawford from Oxford (and Cambridge and Tom Rocks Maths), and CS50’s alumni and friends from Meta!
CS50x Puzzle Day is an opportunity to collaborate on teams of 2, 3, and 4 to solve a packet of puzzles (i.e., logic problems). Among the event’s goals is to send a message that computer science is more about problem-solving than it is about, say, programming. Puzzles are not programming challenges. No prior CS or programming experience needed, just logic and smarts! No team? No problem! We will help teams form at the event.
Open to anyone who is:
- 18 years old or older, per Meta policy
- Taking or teaching (or has already taken or taught) CS50x or any of CS50’s other courses
- Local (or able to travel) to London, United Kingdom
Schedule
- 5pm–6pm Check in, get your CS50 Swag and some pizza!
- 6pm–9pm Puzzle solving
- 9pm–9:30pm Solutions revealed
Quack
Get ready for the first-ever CS50x and Meta Puzzle Day in London! This is your chance to meet and collaborate with classmates on a packet of puzzles (i.e., logic problems). Whether you’re a coding pro or just getting started, this event promises a fun and inspiring experience. Don’t miss out—register now and be part of this historic event! Quack.
— said the CS50 Duck at cs50.ai
Space is limited. Food and swag will be served.
No preparation (or prior background or experience of any sort!) is expected. But you might find it helpful to peruse Fall 2024’s puzzles and walkthroughs of solutions!
If ticket price would prevent you from attending, email outreach@cs50.harvard.edu.
If you are a student at Oxford (whether taking CS50 or not), email outreach@cs50.harvard.edu for a discount code from your ox.ac.uk address.
Past Quotes
- A good activity to do with friends!
- Difficult, Challenging, but most of all, Memorable!
- Extremely fun but mind boggling at the same time
- Great fun, and I think I even have a few non-grey hairs left!
- Had the best online experience of my life. Got a chance to get to know many people from different countries. Absolutely loved the experience.
- I can describe CS50 Puzzle Day in one word as Awesome. It’s just wonderful, I feel so confident after making new friends from other parts of the world, solving puzzles with them which improved my team coordinating skills. I have learned so much from the competition and my new friends and I would love to take part in this competition every year.
- It was a lot of fun and a great way to use your mind in a different way than you usually do day to day.
- It’s brainwreckingly good!
CS50 at Oxford University
This is CS50, Harvard University’s introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science and the art of programming, for concentrators and non-concentrators alike, with or without prior programming experience. (More than half of CS50 students have never taken CS before!)
This course teaches you how to solve problems, both with and without code, with an emphasis on correctness, design, and style. Topics include computational thinking, abstraction, algorithms, data structures, and computer science more generally. Problem sets inspired by the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. More than teach you how to program in one language, this course teaches you how to program fundamentally and how to teach yourself new languages ultimately. The course starts with a traditional but omnipresent language called C that underlies today’s newer languages, via which you’ll learn not only about functions, variables, conditionals, loops, and more, but also about how computers themselves work underneath the hood, memory and all.
The course then transitions to Python, a higher-level language that you’ll understand all the more because of C. Toward term’s end, the course introduces SQL, via which you can store data in databases, along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, via which you can create web and mobile apps alike. Course culminates in a final project.
Associated skills: Cryptography, SQL (Programming Language), JavaScript (Programming Language), Data Structures, Forensic Sciences, Security Software, Computer Science, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Finance, Resource Management, Python (Programming Language), C (Programming Language), HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Algorithms.
Programme details
Course begins: 29th September 2025
Week 0: Scratch
Week 1: C
Week 2: Arrays
Week 3: Algorithms
Week 4: Memory
Week 5: Data Structures
Week 6: Python
Week 7: SQL
Week 8: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Week 9: Flask
Week 10: There will be no class this week as students will be working on their final projects ahead of the showcase at the CS50 fair.
Week 11: CS50 Fair
Online: Mondays from 29th September 2025
Full information on the course can be found on the Oxford University Lifelong Learning Department website here.
In-person (12 weeks): January 2026
Dates are yet to be fixed, but you can sign-up for email updates here.
Online (22 weeks): January 2026
This will be a ‘half-paced’ course for students that would like more time to work on the material and problem sets. Dates are yet to be fixed, but you can sign-up for email updates here.
