When I was a child my grandparents gave me one of those “150 in one” electronic experiment kits. Despite having a professional background in electronics I don’t remember my father doing much to help me use the kit, and so I quickly grew frustrated and set it aside forever.
Decades later I needed to learn fundamentals of electronics for professional credentials to advance my career. I looked up those kits and found they are still being made! (Though much lower quality, as right out of the box the battery boxes had poor connections, which I had to solder)
Using that kit and “Getting started in electronics” by Forrest Mims I taught myself a fair understanding of electronics and how to repair them (if they aren’t robot assembled micro circuits).
This week my children are learning about basic circuits in school and seemed interested in knowing more.
I dug out the all in one kit and we sat at the dining room table doing simple oscillation circuits making sirens and tweeters. They’re too young to really understand transistors and capacitors but we all had a lot of fun, and I intend to keep them going and encourage them to remain interested in hands on science learning.
Your posts just happened to come across my feed today and I found it very interesting. Thank you.
I went to a magnet high school that was essentially a giant cram school. Killed any love I might have had for the material. If my technological education had been more hands-on as you advocate here, I might still be in the field.
One things about video games is that they displaced these scientific hobbies. When my dad was growing up, model rocketry, small engine mechanics, and whatever else could be tinkered with was the norm. Now, the past few generations have had ready made experiences—video games, social media, etc.—to pass the time rather than building something themselves. Today it requires parents to be very intentional to seek out that, so the work you’re doing is really excellent by giving parents some better tools
There’s a fairly fundamental educational engagement strategy here, apart from rote repetition from cram schools or gamification from screen-based learning engines: students find the practical application of knowledge far more interesting and involving than lecture or other “dry” learning. Kinesthetic learning - blending a hands-on experience building Tom’s battlebots or model rockets, with the engineering and applied skills necessary to do that correctly, gives the motivation, gratification, and real-world feedback necessary to do it correctly - and in many cases also a little competition with classmates or rivals from the other team to add a bit of spice.
Good stuff. Ramaswamy is a typical example of the downsides of the cram school approach. He never used his hard-earned technical skill to invent anything useful or expand the frontier of human knowledge. Rather, he used his knowledge and credentials to impress investors, and dissuade them from looking too closely at his business model. Henry Ford, who learned engineering by fixing farm equipment, would have despised him.
When I was a child my grandparents gave me one of those “150 in one” electronic experiment kits. Despite having a professional background in electronics I don’t remember my father doing much to help me use the kit, and so I quickly grew frustrated and set it aside forever.
Decades later I needed to learn fundamentals of electronics for professional credentials to advance my career. I looked up those kits and found they are still being made! (Though much lower quality, as right out of the box the battery boxes had poor connections, which I had to solder)
Using that kit and “Getting started in electronics” by Forrest Mims I taught myself a fair understanding of electronics and how to repair them (if they aren’t robot assembled micro circuits).
This week my children are learning about basic circuits in school and seemed interested in knowing more.
I dug out the all in one kit and we sat at the dining room table doing simple oscillation circuits making sirens and tweeters. They’re too young to really understand transistors and capacitors but we all had a lot of fun, and I intend to keep them going and encourage them to remain interested in hands on science learning.
Your posts just happened to come across my feed today and I found it very interesting. Thank you.
This is really cool! Subscribed!
I went to a magnet high school that was essentially a giant cram school. Killed any love I might have had for the material. If my technological education had been more hands-on as you advocate here, I might still be in the field.
One things about video games is that they displaced these scientific hobbies. When my dad was growing up, model rocketry, small engine mechanics, and whatever else could be tinkered with was the norm. Now, the past few generations have had ready made experiences—video games, social media, etc.—to pass the time rather than building something themselves. Today it requires parents to be very intentional to seek out that, so the work you’re doing is really excellent by giving parents some better tools
There’s a fairly fundamental educational engagement strategy here, apart from rote repetition from cram schools or gamification from screen-based learning engines: students find the practical application of knowledge far more interesting and involving than lecture or other “dry” learning. Kinesthetic learning - blending a hands-on experience building Tom’s battlebots or model rockets, with the engineering and applied skills necessary to do that correctly, gives the motivation, gratification, and real-world feedback necessary to do it correctly - and in many cases also a little competition with classmates or rivals from the other team to add a bit of spice.
Good stuff. Ramaswamy is a typical example of the downsides of the cram school approach. He never used his hard-earned technical skill to invent anything useful or expand the frontier of human knowledge. Rather, he used his knowledge and credentials to impress investors, and dissuade them from looking too closely at his business model. Henry Ford, who learned engineering by fixing farm equipment, would have despised him.