Electronics for Kids, 2nd Edition(nostarch.com) |
Electronics for Kids, 2nd Edition(nostarch.com) |
If nothing else, it may help them understand where to seek solutions for the common problems they encounter. I started learning Electronics at a fairly young age using undergraduate level textbooks that I found lying around. The need for and relationships between concepts in calculus, logarithms and trigonometry were a recurrent problem for me.
PS: If anybody is wondering, those books were from an earlier generation engineer. They were very interesting, to say the least. All the circuits (amplifiers, rectifiers, oscillators, multivibrators, mixers, various RF Txr and Rxr designs, etc) were using vacuum tubes! Diodes, triodes, pentodes, thyratrons, magnetrons, TWTs, etc were used liberally in them. It had a description of an early form of the Instrumental Landing System (ILS). There were also descriptions of some early generation semiconductor devices and their similarity to vacuum tubes. I don't think ICs were in much use back then, because the book had no mentions about them.
I used to spend hours at a time with those books when I was a child. Later I graduated in Electronics engineering and went on to work on the avionics for a satellite launcher. Vacuum tubes were museum pieces by the time I was born. But I was the only one in my undergraduate class who had seen or knew anything about vacuum tubes, when we had lessons on CRTs, magnetrons, etc. I can't stress how deeply those books influenced my education and career. Sweet memories!
Oh my gosh, this was me growing up! I loved tinkering with electronics and programming, but I kept bumping against my lack of knowledge wrt more advanced math topics. I usually hacked around it, or more often just switched to a different project.
Now that I'm taking calculus, I feel like I always have a corresponding application for each topic we cover. It's very exciting!
It took me a while to realise the point. It's all about rates of change. They should start with that. No need to bother with the maths, just look at graphs and be like "that's a steeper slope than that", and, ooh, that one's sloping in the opposite direction. This is a fundamental intuition that's so useful to have. Most people don't understand that braking is acceleration. They just don't have the mental model that lets them see fuel burn and braking as opposite things. The sooner this intuition is there the better. Then teach the maths.
https://www.worldofbooks.com/products/calculus-the-easy-way-...
mathacademy.com very thourough and highly effective.
Modern chemistry sets are extremely lightweight and boring in comparison.
Current ones are little more than what you can find in the kitchen.
It came with over 20 electronic schematics, pictograms how they were set up in the box, an explanation how they worked and a kid compatible story about a professor, a robot and I think some kids. I absolutely loved it. And I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldnt have chosen my current career and hobby trajectory had it not been for this electronics set.
I've moved cities multiple times now and the kit has disappeared over the years. You can still get them on ebay some times, but I was too cheap to buy one.
Through an incomprehensibly unlikely coincidence, someone put this exact kit on the sidewalk for grabs a fee houses and away, maybe a year ago or two. Naturally I took it, and it's complete and seems even unused.
I am now a father and I hope my daughter will find this kit just as interesting as I did 30 years ago.
https://patric-sokoll.de/SonstigeSammlungen/Kosmos%20E200/Ha...
My first computer was their CP1. It was aimed at older children and teens. You programmed it in a custom assembly language. The manual included lots of projects and instructions on how to hook it up to their electronics kits.
http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/computer/kosmos_comput...
http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/computer/pictures/kosm...
That feeling when you hit the right spot on the crystal after stringing up a long antenna in your room…
Some years ago I was in Stuttgart and looked at the Kosmos offerings, and they were pretty sad.
Elenco continues to sell one of the kits that I used to have, less RadioShack branding.
Specifically https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/
Traditional books benefit from having an editor who (ideally) asks questions like "who are you writing for", "what's the best order to introduce ideas", and "how much detail is enough". If you don't ask these questions, you often end up getting too deep into the weeds or jumping back and forth between ideas in ways that can be difficult to follow. To give you a specific example, the guide spends a lot of time on some of the more obscure theories in DC network analysis before even defining what a battery is, capacitors and inductors are explained in the DC section by focusing on their AC characteristics, there is a ton of unnecessary quantum physics trivia ahead of explaining what a diode is, discussion of op-amps kicks off with an odd reference to calculus, etc.
Again, I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just that (properly edited) books have their merits.
But certainly AAC could be a brilliant supplementary resource.
I got taught via recipe books then studied EE at university and had to throw everything away. Then I started in industry and had to throw that away again. There's a huge moat between the two ends.
But playing with clocks and multiplexer is definitely not a beginning of the ladder.
[1] https://www.jameco.com/z/KIT-EFK-BUNDLE-Jameco-Kitpro-Compon...
It had a wonderful kit where you would use screws in a board so you could see every wire path. Much easier to explain than modern breadboards
This is similar to 'intended audience' section of technical books for adults. Do you find those insulting?
My parents didn't know any of those - they were not in STEM professions. I think my questions exceeded their capability when I was quite young. That forced me to seek out resources and professionals. But they didn't let their modest earnings or lack of specialist knowledge prevent me from persistently pursuing interests. The lifestyle they provided me was a richly fertile ground for ideas and growth. I'm also extremely grateful to my parents.
There were some efforts to create ICs with vaccum tubes of micrometer sizes. At those sizes, they don't need heating or vacuum hermetic sealing like the traditional large tubes. But they retained one big advantage over SSDs - they have superior fault resistance and survivability against radiation. That makes them prime candidates for space and nuclear applications. This was like 15 years ago. I thought that they would hit the market for sure by now. I wonder what happened to them.
Speaking for myself, I would have loved to read something like this when I was first experimenting with electronics as a child. A lot of the details would have gone over my head, but even just knowing the general outlines of the topics it covered would have been a huge step up.
> They shouldn't teach calculus like they taught it to me and my peers. Basically we just one day started "differentiating" equations. We learnt a completely mechanical process.
I had a similar experience and it did ruin the fun in Calculus for me. It took me a long time to derive a bare-minimum mental model that I was satisfied with. It was at this point that I could 'feel' (imagine) how the general second-order linear differential equation (of two variables) works, without the need to 'calculate' or derive anything. This equation is the fundamental model for countless phenomena in the universe. It's such a shame, because that equation is easy to explain in words, without doing a single step of derivation.
Don't get me wrong. Formalism and rigor do have very important roles in Mathematics. But ignoring intuition and emphasizing formalism doesn't get you anywhere. Intuition isn't always right, but it shows you the 1000ft view of the problem when it does get it right. Formalizing the solution gets easier from there.
I have noticed that even professionals are taken by surprise when I convey the descriptive explanation. It shows how badly these things are taught. (I don't know if this is the situation everywhere.)
> The sooner this intuition is there the better. Then teach the maths.
Yes, that is exactly what I was suggesting. However, that 'intuition' is also part of Mathematics. Many practitioners call it the 'Mathematical sense', as opposed to common sense. You might have seen a rare few gifted individuals who find the correct answers to unintuitive and confusing problems (like the infamous Monty Hall problem) in their first try. They're employing this mathematical sense while the others revert to common sense. Who knows? Even you may be using it and surprising others without realizing it.
Unfortunately, our educational systems have reinforced this misconception that Mathematics is all about manipulating numbers and symbols (for many, even the idea about symbols are missing). This is a very sad situation that just sucks the life out of mathematics. A long essay (book) by Paul Lockhart, named 'A Mathematician's Lament' explains this problem splendidly.
PS: Funnily enough, I always struggled in and hated mathematics! Others were so good at applying long sequences of operations to get to the answer, while it was Chinese to me! (No offense intended here). But I was good at science. I relied on countless diagrams, tables, concept graphs, signal flow graphs, etc in place of equations and formulae to achieve this. I just converted them to equations and formulae whenever I needed to reproduce those. I thought, "Who needs mathematics when you can reason your way to the answer?"
It was close to the end of my formal education that I realized that every reasoning that I had done in my life was proper Mathematics! I had strong autistic traits and following numerous steps in sequence and in parallel was near impossible for me. But where I made up for that was in spatial intelligence. I had created book after book of Mathematics described in a visual language that I could digest. I didn't really hate mathematics. What I hated was the way in which it was taught and represented.
Learning Mathematics has become a whole lot easier and enjoyable after realizing it and embracing the fact that I needed my own ways of doing it. But honestly, I wish that so much time wasn't wasted in needless frustration.
If you ignore the reviews near the end, the page doesn't have a lot of text. And not everything needs to be accessible by quickly scanning.
Mathematical concepts need not necessarily have any practical or real-life applications (pure mathematics), but it's a worthy pursuit on its own. However, every maths concept we learn outside of specialized mathematics courses have some application (applied mathematics). That's how these courses are designed.
It's funny when some people lament that much of the mathematics they learned at school or uni/college have no real-life applications! I wonder what they think about why they learned it. It also shows a big problem with math education and pedagogy. Many people are sailing without a destination in mind, hoping that they'll just hit some land in the future. The academic practice of mathematics has turned into the drudgery of endless symbolic manipulation.
But at the same time, people like you who lean into creativity, hit the limits of their mathematical knowledge early. For them, the problem isn't that the mathematics they learned have no applications. It's that they don't know where to look for the mathematics they need. Here is the failure of math education. If everyone was taught about the different branches of Mathematics, how they relate to each other and where they're applied, I can guarantee that many students will learn those on their own before they're formally introduced to them. That would enable the talented and interested students to shape their own destiny.
> Mathematical concepts need not necessarily have any practical or real-life applications (pure mathematics), but it's a worthy pursuit on its own.
I guess I always had a sense that this was true, but taking a formal proofs class has really opened my eyes to how true this is. I'm actually planning on doing abstract algebra because I've enjoyed proof writing a ton!
> It's that they don't know where to look for the mathematics they need. Here is the failure of math education.
This is a really interesting space imo, because I did try teaching myself calculus through 3blue1brown, who has super cool visualizations, but also isn't rigorous enough to apply it to complicated problems. On the other end, I also tried Khan Academy, but found it too abstract and hard to follow.
Perhaps that was just since I was 14 at the time, and now I'm better at symbolic reasoning. Yet, there's something so enticing about visualization, that I wish there was a way to have the rigour of set theory with the intuitiveness of visualization (that call is a big reason I love the work that dynamicland.org and folk.computer are doing right now).
That's interesting! I started with abstract algebra (on my own) because I don't know the proper sequence of learning it. I guess I will give proofs a try now.
> I did try teaching myself calculus through 3blue1brown, who has super cool visualizations, but also isn't rigorous enough to apply it to complicated problems. On the other end, I also tried Khan Academy, but found it too abstract and hard to follow.
> I wish there was a way to have the rigour of set theory with the intuitiveness of visualization
Agreed! Intuition and rigour are equally important in Mathematics. The hardest part is making these two meet at some point.
One such moment in my life was when I created a visual model of 3D vector calculus (divergence, curl, gradient, etc) and developed it far enough to explain all its rigourous treatment that I learned in my engineering class. Things just flowed from there. I suddenly gained the superpower to imagine up the explanations for phenomena like the skin effect, and then effortlessly derive their mathematical models.
Some kids use to solder earlier than at 10y.o. so the intended audience is wrong. If the kid has not learned what is a transistor by the age of 5 yet, they are not an intended audience.
Who?
> it makes him looking like an etatist.
Pardon me, but what does that mean? Is that a typo, or am I simply ignorant?
> Some kids use to solder earlier than at 10y.o. so the intended audience is wrong. If the kid has not learned what is a transistor by the age of 5 yet, they are not an intended audience.
I don't know. I can't speak for anyone else, but I do have a history related to that. No one around me knew anything about transistors or soldering. I learned those myself by referring books from the library and few others that I convinced my parents to buy me. But it was well after I was 5. The learning was rapid once I got started.
That's why I confidently said that the age is a guideline and that it may vary between individuals. Learning in children is quite chaotic and it's difficult to establish hard and fast rules.
supporting or having a policy of complete control by the state (= a country's government) over its citizens (= the people who live in a country) and over the economy
