Electrical Engineering Projects to Promote Interest Among High School Students

I have a suggestion.

Instead of jazzing things up which seems to be the trend these days, under some mistaken idea that teaching fundamentals is boring, try the fundamentals.

Best place to start is fundamentals of electricity. That means magnets, iron filings, batteries and the means of making them, magnet wire, etc.

Along the way, with a volt meter and an amp meter, some known stock resisters, etc., you can also teach algebra and its relationship to electrical D.C. currents, i.e., Ohms law.

Start there and I have no doubt you will interest them. Key is making the connection between effects and theory.

Jazzy stuff is what teachers who don't know anything do instead of teaching the elements of science.

You can use those "components that these projects would be based upon....op amps, LED's, 7 segment displays, logic gates, 555 timers, etc." but would that teach them anything about the laws that enable them?

j.

I have no hand in what the professors are going to be teaching. I only have a hand in the projects the students are going to build. I agree that fundamentals are not boring, but for students trying to get a glimpse of what electrical engineering is, I am thinking that more thought-provoking and interesting circuits would be the best way to go. There is not enough time to teach them everything, but I feel that more interesting projects would be a good idea.

I cannot see what is interesting or thought provoking for students about circuits they don't have the tools to understand.

j.

As I told you before. I am not involved in the teaching of the material... only the projects that they are going to build. If I suggest building something that the professors are not planning on teaching, I am sure that they will discuss the material behind the project before actually doing it for more thorough understanding.

I find that learning the rules and laws that govern an effect is and was a turn off to me in my younger years. All these rules and laws mean nothing if you do not have a project to apply these laws.

I have recently been exposed to two recently graduated electronic engineers from a local prestigious university. Nether one of them could design a circuit to light an LED. When I directed them to limit the LED current to 10 MA, they had no clue as to what I was talking about.

I gave them a pile of resistors, a LED showed them how to hook it up and make the measurements of voltage and current. After playing with this stuff (and burning out 3 LEDs) they explained that this was the first time they ever applied Ohms Law. Up until then Ohms Law was words and numbers from a text book.

The point-- Applying hands on ignorance is the first step in the learning process. The rules will follow, when you have to find out --Why?

look around www.makezine.com for fun and simple projects. "Makers" are very popular these days among the young.

This seems like a very useful site. Especially if someone wanted to do something electrical for a science fair. I hope to utilize some of the projects in private if they are not suitable for a 4 hour time period, because they are very interesting.

They also have Maker Fairs in various cities during the year that would be a great field trip if one happened in your area.

Hi Jaxy - MIDI music projects - bringing alive old-school, electronic music sounds of the 1980's, by integrating low cost, old circuit components, firmware with some computer programming - might be interesting. URL's I found: http://www.maxmidi.com/diy/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_(music). - Larry

I like the suggestions so far!

I like the gratification of seeing/hearing something "happen".

Here is a dead simple AM radio

http://hamers.chem.wisc.edu/outreach/radios2/making_an_am_radio.html

Judging by the looks it could be built in a single 4 hour session.

I <3 the link. Even if some of the more complex parts have to be preassembled by my hands, it would be a good project to intrigue them! It seems just as thought provoking (if not more than) the beakman's motor.

This is an eye opener: under supervision

take a hair dryer 2 wire type , plastic tub with water , plug in hair dryer to GFIC receptacle , test the test button so everyone see's it works

ask the outcome of putting it in the water ????

it runs under water and doesn't trip the GFIC or branch circuit 60-80% class got it wrong DON"T TOUCH THE WATER!!! UNPLUG FIRST!!

Excellent idea. Not nearly as easy as it sounds.

I am a stepper motor drive kind a guy. This is a great idea. Something a simple as this could launch a young man (or lady) into the fantastic world of engineering. I think there are many engineers out there that would support and help future engineers with projects. Perhaps it would be possible to organize project groups to provide support and hardware for some of these ideas. Much if not all of this could be done over the internet.

How about a simple crystal radio or a simple direct conversion Shortwave reciever? They can be built with only a handful of parts like a SA602 and they can then play with them to discover different segments of the RF spectrum. Lots of good stuff can be googled up on the Ham sites

Robotics is fun but may be too advanced. Throw in some motors and gears, and let them build a Rube Goldberg -type device to do a simple task, maybe like the game "mousetrap" or similar. I saw a device that would throw a ball for a dog to fetch. The dog brought the ball back and put it in the machine and it drew back and tossed it again... over and over...I have an engineer buddy who has a mail box that has a sensor to detect when the postman delivers the mail. After a short interval, the motor activates and it travels on wheels following a buried cable to his back door. He removes the mail, shuts the door, and it drives itself back to the street.

Unfortunately, I cannot assume that these kids know everything. The Rube Goldberg is a good idea, but it would need to be more electrical than mechanical for the purposes of this program. But I will keep this in mind for future endeavors.

Your engineering friends is very knowledgable. I am amused at the nice invention. Too bad our mailbox would have to cross the road before getting to our house. Our long bumpy driveway would be bad terrain also.

Thank you for your post!

A couple of things come to my mind.

First show the kids how to use a DVM. It's the gadget that enables them to actually "see" the electricity rather than just the results it produces. You can buy them these days for as little as $5.00 if you're not too worried about shock resistance or great accuracy.

Second, electricity and magnetism go hand in hand. They come together in electric motors of all types. Small permanent magnet dc motors are cheap and readily available. They can convert electrical energy into mechanical energy. And vice versa as a generator. With a few simple materials you can build your own motor. And then use it to turn a generator which turns the energy back to electrical. Some will get lost to what we call efficiency. Who can build the most efficient motor? How do we measure the results to see who is the winner?

Ed Weldon

That is a good idea (the DVM). I am not sure how much money I am allotted for my project endeavors, however.

I do believe we have access to small stepper motors though. You have given me a lot of fuel. Making a competition for efficiency may be a good way to keep interest. It would be interesting to see the tactics high schoolers would use to create an efficient motor.

I always found inspiration in reversing the usual "use math to design a circuit" by demonstrating how to use circuits to do math.

Why don't you tell them that Electrical Engineers get all the money, girls (or boys as appropriate) and respect. It's not true but it may improve the numbers.

Those sound like good ideas already! I would love to hear more of your project ideas. The more ideas, the more choices I have! More choices would enable me to make better decisions on which projects would be interesting and which would not be suitable. I do find all these suggestions so far to be very interesting!

This is a start of a motor made from a hard drive. simple and fun. It can operate as a stepper or a Brushless DC motor. Need help with projects? Contact me.

glconley@cox.net

You mentioned Scientific American and that triggered my recollection of a long series of articles they had (and maybe still have) titled something like "the Amateur Scientist". If one could dig up an archive of these magazines in the same location as a copy machine I think the result would be a treasure trove of interesting projects and certainly some adaptable to an electrical engineering lab course.

Ed Weldon

Did they learn Ohm's Law?

j.

Oh yes all the basics were all covered. The project was just a tool the students could hold and demonstrate what they were learning as the semester went along. And it with a few tricks and traps, it caused them to NEED to know what they were learning. Need is a great motivator.

Thank you for the website suggestion. That Christmas tree sounds like tons of fun! Since I am going to be a teachers assistant for an Electric Circuits class for the Fall Semester, my professor may like this project and allow me to introduce it to the group. I will keep that idea in mind until then.

They cannot see why a triac works nor probably understand the theory without a lot of prior explanation.

Solid state is too abstract to give what they need, a material, concrete, sense of what is going on and if they understand Ohm's Law I would hope they achieved that on a lab table with resistors, batteries, volt and amp, and ohm meters.

Better to give them a lab vessel full of distilled water, a couple of metal plates attached to insulated wire, some salt, some acid, some alkali, non-conductive fluids, a battery and appropriate light bulbs, and let them see the elements of what goes into a light dimmer they can understand because it is all in front of them without the high level abstractions of triacs, phase clipping and shifting, and such like.

j.

You have given me tons of material to work with here! Thank you so much for the additional links.

I also applaud you for being a high school science teacher. I look forward to more ideas that you may have!

Can you get a hold of what the professor is teaching? If so I can see if I have any projects that line up with those objectives.

I have a 55KB pdf on what is going to be taught. The basic outline is as follows:

Introduction: safety procedures, using of equipment, etc.

DAY 1: ANALOG ELECTRONICS (Learning of Ohm's Law, Kirchoff's Current/Voltage Law, Creating Series/parallel resistance and voltage divider circuits).

DAY 2: DIGITAL ELECTRONICS (Logic circuits {Hex inverter, AND/NAND/OR/NOR gates, Binary counter}, 555 Timer Circuit).

DAY 3: OPERATIONAL AMPLIFIER (Unity gain buffer, inverting amplifier, non-inverting amplifier, summing amplifier, difference amplifier).

DAY 4: APPLICATION (Magnetic - Levitation Controller).

DAY 5: APPLICATION (Flash Camera).

I have access to many different components and even just projects I can do on my own that may help students to better understand the concepts would be welcome.

Hi Jaxy

I`m going to stick my neck out here but as a teacher of some experience I would say that 555 timers and op-amps can be adequately covered by PIC microprocessors programmed in BASIC and able to perform a mirad of tasks. These chips make a lot of others redundant and are so easy to interface to that they are the `modern day 555`. Music sound effects analogue sensors, event timers even accurate clock modules, 7 seg displays and LCD are all possible and its all accessible below.

http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/

Op-amps will always have a place but they can do that later once their entusiam begins to grow.

Picaxe looks like a pretty neat tool. I can see where you could build a good program around it. It seems to offer a way around wasting too much time "reinventing the wheel"; in this case a simple electronic control system for experiments. This way there would be time to explore a more diverse menu of interesting electrical subjects.

I'd hope that the cost of these particular chips would not disqualify them from the high school program.

Ed Weldon

one of my old favorite websites and it's still up is http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/ lots of projects and a good mix of from scratch and rebuild type projects. Particularly informative is Sam's Laser section

Demonstrate a Jacob's ladder high voltage is very interesting or some other physics demo.