Some students have problems visualizing the application of Ohm’s Law and the equations for voltage, current, resistance, and power. If you work best with visuals, or if you’d just like a place to check your work*, take a look at the Ohm’s Law Calculators available at http://www.the12volt.com/ohm/page2.asp.
*The use of these tools to get homework and practice answers will not help make you smarter or promote understanding! Do your own work first!
This MS Excel spreadsheet can be used to set and compute grades for all your classes!
The directions are on the front page and its pretty self explanatory. You should be able to use this tool with any application that can open MS Excel spreadsheets, including OpenOffice.org Calc and Gnumeric.
Just click on the screenshot below to download the grade tracker in .zip format.
As a teacher, I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting ways to promote learning in my classes. As a geek, its cool to find ways to do that with technology. I recently found out about an awesome website, Merlot.org, that serves as a place for teachers of all disciplines to share lessons and information. During my review of that site, I found a few games that will help students learning the basics of electronics reinforce that information.
Nick Reeder, of Sinclair Community College in Ohio, has come up with some “Challenge” games that I really like:
The Metric-Prefix Challenge helps students practice and learn their metric prefixes. This is a critical skill in learning electronics.
Test equipment is essential to troubleshooting and observing electronic circuits. The Multimeter Challenge and the Oscilloscope Challenge help students practice using these devices.
Understanding and remembering resistor color codes is critical to successful circuit analysis. The Color Code Challenge helps with that.
Another very cool tool, from David Shaheen at Owen Community College, is the Resistor Placement Game. This game is going to become an integral part of my lessons on this topic.
Tools like these are great for visual and kinesthetic learners, but they are fun for almost everyone!
Often, when I start teaching a new semester of basic electronics, the first thing we talk about is scientific notation as it applies to metric notation. As part of my teaching process, I build a number line to visually illustrate the relationships between the powers of ten and their metric equivalent.
One of my students, shared the mnemonic that he learned for the negative exponents and made up a new one for the positive exponents.
On the positive exponent side of the number line, reading from left to right, the mnemonic is “Ten (Tera) Grey (Giga) Mountain (Mega) kats (kilo).” Moving to the negative exponent side of the number line you have “my (milli) mom (micro) nits (nano) pelts (pico).”
For some, just memorizing the number line is enough to promote storage of this information in long term memory, but others need something like the mnemonic devices that David came up with. Either way, this is a great tool for learning the different values associated with metric notation!
In many of the courses I teach, my students become interested in Linux and express an interest in learning the command line and becoming more proficient with the inner workings of this operating system. This is something that I’m interested in as well, so I thought I’d take a few moments here to talk about the tools I’ve found most helpful with this issue.
First of all, there is a really cool, Ubuntu-based distribution called INX (Is Not X), which boots from a live CD and includes a bunch of real time tutorials as well as all the basic apps to be a real distribution. Just click on the image below to check it out for yourself.
For those who want other options, there are two that I like quite a bit. The folks over at LinuxCommand.org have set up a nice online tutorial that is informative, nice to look at, and easy to use.
Finally, M. Stonebank, from Surrey, has set up a UNIX tutorial that you can use online or download for offline use. I thought that was a cool idea so I mirrored it HERE for those of you that can find me easier than the bookmark for the original site. If you want to download it for use offline, you’ll need to follow the link to his site and get it from there.
Happy Learning!
When learning electronics, students often find themselves wishing that they could practice more outside of class. This is somtimes difficult due to the equipment required to build and measure electronic circuits.
The University of Colorado has developed a library of interactive simulations that run in any java enabled browser. There are simulations covering a variety of math and science related topics, including electronics.
For our purposes, there are a variety of circuit related simulations that can be used to build both AC and DC circuits. There are also some interesting simulations for learning Ohm’s Law and for working with resistance in a wire.
Best of all, you can use these tools online or download them to use any time. All you need is a good web browser with Java enabled!
For some reason, the database became corrupted a while back and we weren’t able to restore it to completely working order. So here we are, with a brand new installation and theme.
Some of the old posts will be reposted and some will be moved to The Homework Guru soon. So we start fresh and make good things happen.
Enjoy!