Motivation in Practical Electronics

Hi,

I am into industrial supply of Motion products and educational training kits for institutions. Currently, there is a trend to change the teaching methods in schools and institutions to divert away from theory and fundamentals. Applications especially in the industries are being emphasized so as to allow hands-on and from the applications, theories are taught. In this way, as the students proceed to senior level, they are more experienced and aware of what has been studied instead of the old traditional way where they can be excellent in their work but are not able to relate to the actual practical aspects.

Games, DIY competitions, Creative design contest etc are also useful to create an interest in practical participations. Robotics competitions, for example, has been extremely successful in creating innovative young engineers !!

I will buy that Robotics competition idea.

Creativity in design comes only after one has learnt the basics and achieved a level in perfection. It does not start from zero.

Games do not evolve creativity of electronics. Perhaps sharpen one's brain in use of electronics. Games are developed by the eexperts.

I have see LEGO tools and perhaps they may be considered for creativity as they are modular designs and one has to use some personal invovement in it to see results. This may be good thing as chances of failure are reduced due to perfacted designs and result comes from one's own combinations. LEGO are robotics zone kits.

The first point I am talking about is, how to make a horse to drink water after we have taken it near the water. What makes it to think about drinking water is its own feelings about the need of water. Robotics, is interesting point and looking at it one can feel involved and get into an idea of learning. I will try this one.

I will rather consider the electronics hardware and software very boring subjects to some people. Perhaps one may fear electronics so badly that one will not try firsthand. Using electronics is not same as doing it. Hence, all practical training of using electronics must bring negative results. But, that is not true as we love using oscilloscope, function generators etc to take help in electronics creativity. Something is wrong with this analogy here. We like to do small things and we like to use smart thing to get results faster and accurate. This looks closer to learning process we oftem have. Now point is how to make one to do small things?

Let me see if I can somehow start the firsthand thing. If horse drinks small amount of water then it may find its usefulness and may drink more. Thereafter horse will drink more water each time. Hence, our Horse must gulp small amount of water somehow. This is my starting point. I need to invent a way to do it or make the horse to do it. If I feed salt to the Hotse then horse may drink some water. What is the salt for electronics education? I need to find salt for mind now.

Can any one bring out any other idea?

You are right that electronics could be boring, not like robotics. But don't forget that without electronics, the robot cannot be as interesting and intelligent. Electronics is the small things inside every single control nowadays. How to make things more intelligent, better sensing capability, faster response, etc, etc. None of these can be achieved without electronics.

Creativity can also be incorporated into electronics by adding life to existing controls. Games can too be developed even by kids. Feeding Salt to the horse to make them drink will only result in tuning their mindset that they have to drink because of the salt. However, if you can show them how other animals have been enjoying their drink, you can motivate them to think "why drinking water is so enjoyable and maybe they should try it too", without forcing them to have the first taste of water......

I accept your point. Exposing to ideas in friendly manner may help. Robotics show is one such thing. My son was participating in many robotics competitions while he was electronics engineering students. He and his friends were developing robots for months working day and night, and that was making me and my wife mad. In actual competition at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur where his team participated in the competition, there were one 10000 onlookers and only few hundred participants. Team of my son won top prizes but many who did not won prizes were also appreciated as they had shown their creativity. Onlookers were also motivated to some level. We organize such activities only once a year as students have lots of theory classes, tight exam schedule etc.

I will avoid salt idea. I will try exposure idea. Thanks for this great nice thinking. I welcome it. Perhaps it will last longer if technology exposure by road-shows is common. It is similar to making radioactive isotopes in nuclear reactor, where you expose the normal matter to neutrons and you get a radioactive substance after exposure to neutrons. It is no longer an ordinary matter thereafter. This Neutron exposure idea may hold on for long even though there is decay involved. Robotics show (active or passive) participation can be equivalent to neutron exposure idea.

Any new other idea? I feel better now after reading just few comments. They are very valuable to me. Thanks.

Let the students break things.

Example:

Start with a simple rectifier circuit, let them increase the load until the diode turns into a LED or smokes, component failure as entertainment.

Show them the danger. electronics as an extreme event.

Use failed circuit boards to play name that failure, analyize [play detective] the possible reasons for the failure & how to design circuits to avoid the failure(s) in their designs.

Don't you think a small blast of capacitor will scare them away?

I have trained few high school level boys in electronics PCB assembly and these fellows always want to experiment.

One of them wanted to see if there is power in the mains and for this he took small conductor wire and wanted to insert directly into mains socket to see if there was some spark. I happens to be near by and I averted accident in time.

I am sure if we tell them to try to blow things in my presence, then they will also try things in my absence. I am not sure of the results. I may not have my work place visible thereafter.

I also remember my very early days of electronics. I was having a Microprocessor Kit connected with 5V power supply. Perhaps some ome was in greater need of the power supply so he removed the power supply and inserted the 5V DC power line to kit in 230V mains socket when power to mains was switched OFF. Then another person simply switched ON the mains power and there was big blast from the microprocessor kit capacitors and all parts gone.

I have also lost one engineer who touched high voltage capacitor of laser power supply, when mains power to the instrument was OFF but its capacitors were holding 10kV charge with lots of surrent capacity. He died in few seconds. He experimented with death.

In another incident, I had built an automatic temperature profiling system with lots of panel buttons for control to make it simple for me. As per monkey habit, one junior started playing with front panel buttens and system started heating rapidly to 500C. He could not fugure out how to stop the system so went on pressing switches in random sequence for God knows how long. In heating chamber I had left a Teflon disk on a fast very heater and above that was a Photomultiplier tube to measure light from Teflon disk placed on heater. As this man made the system to exceed 500C in few seconds, the Teflon disk was dicomposed and fumes from it went up and got deposited on expensive photon counting Photomultiplier tube. I lost US$3000 worth Photomultiplier Tube. Somehow my system was built to trunkate the heating cycle so it came to halt after some time on its own.

Looks to me that electronics was never meant for monkeys.

I will not buy this idea of destructive learning. Perhaps give me some better one. I have too many zero level men around who somehow want to be electronics engineers. I am very afraid of them doing uncontrolled experiments.

I certainly don't advocate uncontrolled experiments.

Point well taken, I to have seen my share of harmful [to both human & equipment] incidents.

The students who are naturally curious aren't the ones you are trying to motivate. the examples you gave are proof of why every engineer should be required to have a certain level of practical skill. Safety is for everyones benefit.

I seem to have to deal with the monkey factor, daily! Designing & implmenting "monkey proof "[resistent] solutions is another sort of competition that could motivate.

Some sort of troubleshooting competion, would work. for a small %, design competion for another %.

Some of the students you are trying to motivate shouldn't be engineers , they are only doing it for the money & will end up as middle management, never dealing with anything remotly technical.[zero level men], convincing them to go into other fields would be a service to all!

Perhaps some practical history, radio from crystal to satalite, with examples of the evolution of the equipment & design tecniques involved.

This is a very interesting question, a key to developing the next generation of design professionals.

Friendily competition and the "bragging rights" from winning the competition are very good motivators. Here we have local and national contests for robot design, between high schools and also between colleges. The designs are usually carried over to the next year with improvements, or are totally redesigned. The projects are usually not funded, or a little money is allocated. This helps the students to learn R&D and economics. Check out www.usfirst.org.

I do remember that US First and that must be 25 year by now. I used to write in EDN and electronics Design many new design ideas under name worldfriends and was a nuclear scientist at that time. Even now you can dig my name on their website.

Yes, I do have robotics Training Program and Robotics Club of India. I did organize Robotics workshops in Singapore and India and also have one training program for engineers. In Singapore it was meant for 10-year and above. Unfortunately Singapore program got terminated now as the person who was help Mr. Jimmy Low MD for Educational Robotics died and there was no one else to take over. We received some help from Mr. Don Golding and he sent few robots, There were few Roboarm and also that nice Heathkit talking robot. Ken fro Parallax Inc. also supported and National University Singapore, Nanyang Polytechnic Singapore were also helping the program. I was key designer for the program and people used to come with their children.

In India, only engineers in their undergraduate final year come to learn. NCVER-2004 March 1-5, 2004 National Conference & workshop on Virtual Instruments, Embedded Systems and Robotics was organized by me and it with later followed by another conference on Sensors Technology NCST-2004 December 27-28, 2004. These were meant for students and industrial professioanls. There were 450+200 participants and meeting lunchs and dinners were funded by Mr. Ken MD Radiometrix UK and Chaiman Rotrax International Mauritius. With all this exposure to local engineers and free entry to the program, we found some interest developing in them. On regular bases I get about 25-50 enginners from local colleges and similar number from other parts of the country to join the training. We have about 10000 undergradure engineering students who are often very relactant to do anything serious or funny.

I find more interest in students towards self learning in developed countries and perhaps it is not of priority in my country. Those have come to learn found themselves at much better level in higher education and also in jobs, but others fear it too much.

Even though I run this high technology OEM industry, I spend some time teaching both lecturers and their students in engineering students as specially hired faculy member and I am also paid reasonably high. I am not sure in what new ways I can make them jump for fun learning and knowledge based life. I love it but others are too much scared of it.

Thanks for ideas and I will try them. I have enough resources like robotics parts, sensors, motors, controllers and worth million dollars. I can give a lot of these to the students who want to learn here. I am not able to make the horse to drink water is the real problem. Horse has no life without water is also known to the horse. But horse is too scared to go near the water. More you pull it towards water, more it gets scared.

I am taking note of all you suggest and I trust your experience a lot. Keep putting ideas and I will try some useful numbers.