Any school should have an oscilloscope for the physics classes. Nothing can beat "seeing" the results as a waveform.
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I absolutely agree. And they do have some have scopes actually. The problem here is: This experiment is done in 6th grade (ages 11-13). So your conditions look like this:
- You have a time frame of 45 minutes (1 "school hour")
- The students have not learned about electricity yet, so an instrument displaying voltage over time is a very abstract thing.
- Setting up the experiment cannot consume much time (could be done with reading a preset made by the teacher though)
As an EE, of course i would like everybody to learn about an oscilloscope. But for this experiment, you just don't have the time to learn how to work with a scope. And with the timeframe given, you cannot be side-tracked to learn another, unrelated skill, to be able to perform the experiment that is meant to learn about the actual topic.
I wouldn't give this a second though if wee were talking about university students, but in a middle school scenario, this doesn't work well. Here you need pre-chewed, ready-to-go equipment that can be set up in 2 minutes and get going.
I've been supporting the school with STEM related stuff for several years now, and the one lesson that I've learned is that making knowledge as accessible as possible is very, very hard. Much harder than the engineering part actually. Much of the knowledge we take for granted just isn't there. Voltage? dunno! Waves? dunno! Reflections? dunno!
There's a German company named PHYWE who make this kind of stuff for schools. Their stuff is designed like that too. Inputs that will take any amount of abuse, built like a tank because it can and
will fall, huge displays that can be read from 20m away, stuff like that. Of course the pricing reflects that.
So me and a bunch of other parents have started making stuff, repairing stuff that broke down, raise funds to acquire new equipment and so on. Now, all of that should be provided by our government, but as you can probably guess, it isn't. The town I live in has a lot of debts, and budgets are always small.