Notes on component building with students (Contributed by team member Karin)

This design concept has the capacity to be utilized in an array of settings and situations, regardless of the age of the students or economic status of the school. It is highly versatile and reproducible. Most components could be produced by the students themselves, dependent on age-range; many materials could be used to match student skill-levels and available funding.

The instructor will have minimal prep time with the focus being on providing the students with a hands-on learning experience. Each child could be given the basic materials to construct their own resistor, capacitor, diode, etc.  During the process they could work on assembly of the interior structure, wrapping the wire around wooden dowels or thin wood scraps, basic soldering of the real component that will make it functional, and then bringing in the fun of adding a casing to the component. The casing is the most adaptable element of this project.  Materials could be paper mache, basic earthen clay, polymer clay, clayche, tubing, pipes, pop cans, foam, cardboard, masking tape, etc, the sky is the limit.  With institutions that have limited resources this can really open the door to
reusable resources such as used paper/shredding or refuse (cans, bottles, card board etc.) from the school or community.

This is a great activity for students who need a very tactile approach or possibly students with special needs such as ADD or *sensory integration issues and so on.  The deep pressure or “heavy work” of clay could help regulate a child after the intense concentration needed for soldering, thus finishing the lesson with a positive experience.

Another facet of the lesson could be a written assignment for homework that could go more in depth on what they just created.  If each child had a different resistor, they could research what each color represents, what the function that component is and the different applications that may be specific to that component type.  After completion of the written assignment, they could present to the class their component and give a brief lesson on what they learn and show off their finished product. The instructor could then go back and review the different types and then test the class on what they just learned.

Once the components are made, the instruction can continue into how each component works in forming a complete circuit.  The complexity or simplicity of instruction can be custom fit to the audience, time available, and desired outcome.

Overall this classroom project will cover fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, art, basic electronic knowledge, public speaking, writing skills, and problem solving.

Notes on using the Big Board in a classroom setting (Contributed by team member Mike)

Having taught a number of beginning level electronics classes, I understand well the difficulty in getting students past the dull parts of the topic (Voltages are plus and minus labeled thus; current is this little arrow. This is a battery, this is a resistor.) to the exciting parts (OMG my light is blinking I did it!!!). Those of us with some years of experience behind us have likely forgetten what it is like to look at a schematic and see nothing but cryptic squiggles and bizarre pictographs. An analogy I like to use with prospective instructors is to try and get them to imagine what it is like to visit a country with an alphabet significantly different to your own (for Westerners, and nation where Arabic is the dominant script is a good example): not only do you not know what the written messages are trying to convey, you can't even parse them as written messages, and you feel overwhelmed!

The Big Board is effectively a way for students to get to the good parts of the story without having to learn the alphabet first. By teaching the mechanics of the breadboard (horizontal rows connect thus, and columns thus, for instance), and teaching basic assembly practices (don't let bare wires touch each other, etc) through hands-on creation of functional circuits, students learn an intuitive sense of what they are doing and get very instant rewards for their efforts. Once the circuit constructed, an instructor can bring out the schematic and tie the various physical sections of the complete circuit to the conceptual areas of the circuit diagram.

As the class progresses, other instructional possibilities become available. The instructor can pre-build a circuit before class begins and ask students to draw out the schematic, and figure out what the circuit does based on that. A programmable device can be added (more on this later) which simulates various functions of digital circuitry (logic gates, adders, ALU functionality, registers, combinatorial circuits, etc), and the students can be provided with a smaller version of the instructor's circuit and asked to reverse-engineer the "black box" and figure out what's inside. Difficult topics such as race conditions and switch bounce can be demonstrated in a macro scale in front of the whole class, on a device programmed to produce such glitches more readily than it might otherwise do. In a more advance setting, say a college electronics lab, non-functional versions can be wired up at the front of the room to allow students to more quickly create the circuit to be used in the day's lab project (the point of those classes being more to teach about what a circuit does than how to build on a breadboard, and the instructor's time being limited).