Effective education is not limited to transferring materials from one person’s head to another, but also needs to convey the principles that enable us to achieve our goals. [Mara BOS] showed us a toolkit (twitter,
You can use it to arm your students and create a small playground where, given a set of constraints, they can invent and formulate their own communication protocols.
The tool aims to teach digital communication protocols from different directions. We all know that UART, I2C and SPI have different use cases, but why? Why is baud rate important? When is the clock or chip selection line useful? What happened at the beginning? We can find the answers to these questions by ourselves through psychological reverse engineering, but these things can be taught better, [Mara] shows us how to do this.
Guided by your observations and insights, your students will define new and old communication standards from scratch and rediscover concepts such as acknowledgement bits, bus contention, and even DDR. And, as you pointed out, the skills they just discovered are the same as those in the real world, and you’ll see the light bulbs continue in their minds – realizing that they may also be part of the next generation of engineers designing future technologies.
The toolbox she showed includes circuit boards with three toggle switches, some through-hole resistors and an LED, a buzzer for short-circuit signal and AAA battery base to make the circuit boards self-sufficient. These circuit boards can easily become products in the welding process! Connecting these boards to more and more RCA cables, students work in groups and use switches on one set of boards to transfer data to another. She made a video showing how these circuit boards work, and the video is embedded below.
When teaching, you don’t always have to stand in front of the whiteboard – usually a few custom whiteboards work, and often better. We have seen educational PCBs for logic gates before. When it comes to kits that can be distributed for experiments, there are many concepts, such as splicing magnetic circuit blocks. If you want to know why you need all these different tools, remember that we have discussed how the education system can disable the hacker’s mind.