By Julia Schwarz
When Brian Phillips arrived at Princeton, he knew he wanted to major in computer science and was eager to get started. But then, to his disappointment, he failed to place out of the department’s introductory course.
“Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” is the largest class at Princeton — hundreds of students, majors and non-majors, take it each year. One of the reasons the course is so successful is that it makes computer science accessible to everyone, regardless of their academic background.
But there’s a flip side to this: Students like Phillips, who have some background in computing when they arrive, are sometimes bored. A few years ago, Alan Kaplan, a teaching faculty member, noticed that more and more students were arriving with some background in computing. They can’t quite place out, Kaplan said, but they know enough that the course isn’t particularly difficult.
To engage these students and make the course more challenging for them, Kaplan had an idea: create a special section oriented around a Raspberry Pi, a powerful single-board computer about the size of a cell phone. Kaplan’s section would meet in precepts, which are twice-weekly small group meetings that all students in the class attend, in addition to twice-weekly lectures.
For most students in the course, precepts are an opportunity to discuss concepts introduced in lectures in more depth and get help with problem sets and assignments. For students in Kaplan’s precept, about half the meetings would be used instead to learn something new: how to use and program a Raspberry Pi using Java.
Participation in this section is entirely optional and self-selecting, Kaplan noted. Students are asked to sign up only if they have some background in computing and previous knowledge of Java, but there aren’t strict prerequisites.
To develop the exercises for the precept, Kaplan received funding from the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and hired two Princeton undergraduates, Nicholas Sudarsky and Dak Cheung Cheng, both of whom had recently taken the introductory course. “The precept was collaboratively designed with significant input from Princeton students — truly a precept by students, for students,” Kaplan said.
Sudarsky, who graduated in 2023 and is now a master’s student in computer science, has been instrumental to the evolution of the precept. He has taught in all six iterations over the past three years, first as an undergraduate assistant and then as a graduate teaching assistant. About 70 students have participated in the class in total.
Sudarsky knew something about Raspberry Pis before he started designing the precept — he had first worked with them as a high school student in Galway, Ireland. “It has all of these cool features that you can actually program,” he said. “And there’s all of this hardware that you can add to it, and then you can program that hardware.” This functionality lends itself to creativity, he said.
Learning to use a Raspberry Pi also exposes students to a range of foundational computer science tools. Most crucially, Raspberry Pis use the open-source operating system Linux, which is used across academia and industry. Through using Linux, students are also introduced to bash, a scripting language. They also get comfortable with terminal, an interface which allows a user to interact with a computer’s operating system using text commands and various system tools and utilities.
When Phillips learned about what Kaplan and Sudarsky were doing, he went to the first precept meeting and was hooked. “It was really cool, getting to set up the Raspberry Pis and working with physical hardware,” he said. Hardware isn’t something that students typically get exposure to in introductory computer science classes, he added.
The best part, Phillips said, was that students weren’t evaluated on their work with the Raspberry Pis. They were just doing it for fun. “You were honestly just learning for the sake of learning,” he said.
For Phillips, who is now an undergraduate instructor in the precept, taking the course changed his whole experience as an undergraduate. He learned how much he liked working with hands-on material and took classes he otherwise wouldn’t have considered. “I was a lot more confident,” he said, “and probably more prepared.”
Now a rising senior, his advice to incoming students interested in the precept is not to be intimidated. “I think a lot of students come in and are maybe scared that they won’t immediately get it,” he said. “But you can really get out of it what you want. You can go at your own pace. You can ask questions.”