Life, Learning, and Enlightenment

When teaching electronics, students often find themselves wishing that they could practice more outside of class. This is often 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!

     

Last week, I started teaching a new semester of basic electronics at St. Philips College. 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.

This time, one of my students, David Solfest, 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!