General > General Technical Chat
Spintronics - Learning electronics with mechanics?
Zeyneb:
Hmm, my problem with analogies is that you never know to which degree they hold up. I think it is way more educational for a kid to show some circuit in LTSpice and then build the the same circuit on a breadboard and
confirm what LTSpice tells you with an actual multimeter or scope reading. Now when the child says Hey what if we do this to the circuit? Alright put it in LTSpice and see what you get. Then the concepts of voltage, current really starts to live for what it actually is.
Circlotron:
I can look at an analog or a discrete digital schematic and think yep, yep, I can see what's going on here. No big deal. A musician can look at a page of sheet music and "hear" what the music sounds like. Not me though.
When I program in assembly I almost always visualise the operations kind of mechanically.
PlainName:
--- Quote ---way more educational for a kid to show some circuit in LTSpice and then build the the same circuit on a breadboard and
confirm what LTSpice tells you with an actual multimeter or scope reading
--- End quote ---
Didn't work for me. Not that electronics kits came with LTSpice, nor a scope. Not even a multimeter. And if they had they would have meant nothing at all. I think at that age it's hard to hold a coherent set of abstractions together - the pretending something invisible is going on at one end, then the completely arbitrary squiggly stuff being shown at the other, and zero idea of what the bits in between are doing. In my case at least there were sounds coming out in response to contacts being pressed, but it's just another magic trick like how cars go and bikes don't fall over, etc.
Now, Meccano was different in that you can see and feel and break things in a knowing way. You might not know you've built a lever but it levers all the same, regardless of what battery you're not using or fancy display you don't have and complete lack of instructions. It's relatable in a way that invisible, silent electricity isn't.
Circlotron:
I wonder if the generations that grew up on vacuum tubes found it easier to visualise what was going on in a circuit? The fact that you could see where the electrons were coming from and going to, and the grid(s) that had an effect on them.
PlainName:
This analogies thing... don't know if they are useful or not, but perhaps we're looking at the wrong end on this.
Typically, the water pipes analogy is used. You show a resistor and say how that's like having a narrower pipe, which kind of works but then breaks down when you go a bit far (or some pedantic nerd joins in). But what if you did it the other way: tell a plumber that a resistor is just like a narrow pipe. There is less chance of the analogy breaking down in that direction because he doesn't know enough about the resistor to realise where it falls over (he knows plenty about pipes, but that's not what he's trying to understand). Dig deep enough so the analogy does break down, and by then he should know enough for electronics to be standalone.
So here instead of trying to describe electronics with mechanical simulacrums, the trick would be to use these specific modules to make circuits. And only those modules. Ultimately, when you've got the hang of what can be done, and how, it should be relatively easy to replace those modules with their electronic equivalent since you already know what they do and basically how they do it, it's just the detail that changes.
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