Re: On electronics

[William Beaty <billb@eskimo.com>]

On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:

> I suspect that electronic engineering today is very very different from what
> it
> was fifty years ago. What percentage of learning time do they devote to
> physics
> in teaching electronics today? Do we have some electronics experts on phys-L?

> From my own experience, I would say that far too little physics appears in
electronics classes and texts.  As with physics, there is subject-matter
bloat in electronics, and the time limits cause the basics (i.e. Physics) 
to be reduced as more and more stuff is crammed into the courses.  I took
two semesters of undergrad physics.  But I have had very little contact
with this since graduating EE in 1980. That's before the appearance of
PCs!  (I built an 8080 Polymorphics-88 kit as a hobby project in Sophomore
year.) 

In later years, the single biggest aid to my own electronics skills was to
learn some Electrostatics.  But everone knows that "static" is just a
feeble and useless phenomena, important only for explaining dryer cling,
right?  It has nothing to do with the "current electricity" that appears
in wires...  Another big help was that I taught myself to recognize all
the connections between electronics and physics.  This skill does not
appear by itself.

Electronics teachers speak an alien "language".  In electronics, potential
difference and charge carriers do not exist (They are replaced by
"voltage" and "current electricity".)  Transistors are explained wrong,
yet nobody recognizes it.  Wires and light bulbs are explained wrong!  Yet
progress is made, because the network of concepts and misconceptions is
full of kludges and repairs, bandaids and krutches which allow designers
and technicians to stagger onwards.  Therefor, learning some
straightforward electronics is NOT guaranteed to aid our physics
understanding, since there is a huge conceptual barrier which prevents us
from RECOGNIZING all the physics concepts that are part of the electronics
courses we undergo.  A cooking class does not make one a chemist, and
years of cooking experience might even damage our ability to understand an
intro chemistry course.  Yet a cooking class might be profoundly
enlightning if TAUGHT by a chemist.

Electronics, if taught by a physics educator, would be fascinating.  I've
never encountered such a thing.  Still, it might be difficult for such an
educator to avoid communicating electronics language and
"electronicsthink", which would cause all the obvious physics to become
invisible to students.  It would be better if the instructor was
inexperienced with the conventional electronics arena.  She would have to
write her own textbook. 

I suspect that the Chabay/Sherwood approach and the "Castle Project" 
approach are the current best examples of coherently melding physics with
electronics, but I don't have enough contact with the real educational
world, and can't recommend myself as a trustworth authority on this.  Yet
I am convinced that if we don't first do something to defeat student
Electricity Misconceptions, a standard electronics course is guaranteed to
reinforce them.

"Castle" is an intentional attack on misconceptions, but it really is a
high-school electricity course.  Is anyone familiar with the Castle
materials?  http://nellie.pacificu.edu/ed/castle/castle.html


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