fun fun fun
Last night's study hall involved building circuits on breadboards. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of giving the students a bit of a difficult circuit to build:
It even took me quite a while to figure it out and make it work. Needless to say, the kids had a lot of trouble putting it together. There was frustration all around and some regret for me and Clark. Today, however, was better!
Most of what we did in class today was pretty hands-on. Clark explained how transistors worked for the first bit of class, but then after lunch we had them build some simpler circuits. Then they worked up to something a little more complicated, but much more manageable than the other one:
No worries with this one about crossed wires and trying to figure out the alignment of multiple transistors (the things labeled with a Q, for those unaware). Most of the kids were able to do this pretty well, so I was happy. Plus, this was kind of fun because we presented it to the class as "Glen's activity," so I told them what to do and helped them out with it. I help out all the time anyway, of course, but it was almost like my own lesson and that felt really good.
Tonight's study hall basically involved more breadboarding. One thing we did that I found fun, though, was I build four equivalent circuits in Multisim. Well, only 3 were equivalent. One was slightly different, and the idea was for the students to make sure they could tell which one was off. I hooked my laptop up to the room's projector and gave kids turns with a yardstick to point at it.