What ever happened to a breadboard and a flashing LED?

"David L. Jones" a écrit dans le message de news:%2qwl.125074$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe04.iad...

Dead the day it took 200000 transistors in a PIC to emulate a 2 transistors astable...

-- Thanks, Fred.

1. Loads slow. 2. Cheezy progress bar. 3. Rotating flying logo is so 1997. 4. Audio sounds like something from a "free background music" site. 5. Dumbest logic puzzles since "Myst".

Further along, as with the submarine, it gets better. But it's at best mediocre edutainment. It's too much of what game designers call a "track ride", where you're forced through a sequence of events. That's where gaming was ten years ago.

Someone started with a lesson plan and tried to hammer it into a video game format. That usually sucks.

John Nagle

Why would a kid want to do that?

On the one hand, it's possible to get an incredible amount done on a desktop today, what with free EDA tools, FPGA programming capability, cute little board systems like Arduino, free programming tools for microcontrollers, and low-cost parts.

On the other hand, the knowledge you need to use all that stuff effectively is substantial. It's all on the web, and a few kids will figure it out. But not many; there's not much social support for that kind of thing. And, in the end, what comes out will be less cool than something you can buy.

This isn't a new problem. There are some classic books from the 1950s, "A Boy and a Battery", "A Boy and a Motor", etc. Those describe how to build your own electric train set from used tin cans, if you have vast amounts of free time, a really good set of tools, and the skills of a master machinist.

John Nagle

One of the things that got me interested was an Apple ][ game called "Rocky's Boots". You solved puzzles by putting logic elements together. The setting was a series of rooms. One of the best parts I remember was that you could go back to previous rooms and steal their components to build ever more complicated things:

(latter one has screenshots)

It looks like a pretty neat game, actually.

Realistically, when you have kids that already have cell phones that let them wirelessly surf the Internet, stream video, text, and (gasp!) talk by the age of 12, it's hard to motivate them that "engineering is interesting" if you use a "bottoms up" approach with that flashing LED -- starting with what they already know (phones, video games, etc.) and then encouraging them to perform a "top down" analysis is probably more effective.

Still, my opinion is that you don't really need that much motivation for people who are going to be decent engineers anyway -- while there are certainly some borderline cases where someone who turned out to be an accountant could have been the next Bob Pease, in most cases those who ended up being decent engineers were probably taking stuff apart of their own volition by about age 6. One of my favorite childhood memories was the place I went to kindergarten -- "play time" consisted of them hauling out some old busted phonographs, radios, small appliances, etc., handing us kids some screwdrivers, hammers, etc... and letting us have at them. :-)

---Joel

I played that a bit -- it was awesome!

"Ok, Jason, new rule... you can take apart your toys, but not the house."

Both my kids assemble their own PCs from parts when they get upgrades. They both know how to use most of the power tools in the basement, and they both know some car repair.

It's important to teach them how to learn.

FWIW, my pcb tutorial starts off with a non-blinking LED and leads up to a blinking one:

During my childhood I disassembled spinning wheels, and pedal-pumped sewing machines... no kidding ;-)

My grandparents on my mother's side had a pedal-pumped console organ, but they wouldn't let me touch it ;-)

...Jim Thompson

My mother tells this story, I'm not sure if it's true...

When I was a young kid, we had two TVs. One worked, one didn't. One night my mom woke up hearing some sounds downstairs. She came down and found me with the TVs - watching one and taking apart the other. How cute, she thought, until she realized I was taking apart the working one - and watching the now-fixed broken one.

I still have a blinking led on every device I make that contains a microcontroller. Proves very handy. If the led blinks check the interfacing cables, if not check the power.

Customers like a few flashing lights as well. Oh... and the guys that hired you, esp if they are not engineers.

You answered your own question below (for those kids who are still curious about such things)

That's why most start with simple hands-on stuff like a flashing LED.

But of course it's all changed now, and there are far too many other exciting distractions for kids. Before the techno/computer craze came along though, curious kids built stuff and learned because there wasn't much else to feed your curiosity. Electronics was a much more visible field to play around in then, now it's just down in the noise floor.

Dave.

Actually you can blink LED's all you want with a platform that costs as little as $20 or haven't you heard of the Arduino?

Or a 2n2222, 2 resistors and a cap, but the thread is not about the many ways to blink an LED.

Many (most?) of the kids today have been jaded by the advances made in technology since the "breadboard days". Binking an LED carries no charm for them against the background of the alphabet soup of commonplace electronic stuff like IPODs, MP3's TIVO, DVD, PCs, Cell phones etc etc. Most of today's population can't conceive of what it was like without radio or television or even microwave ovens. The "magic" of how a voice or an image of someone 100 or 10,000 miles away gets to your house has lost its luster. It used to be that the kid who knew how to wire up an extension phone or an intercom was looked at as some kind of genius by his neighbors. That skill was valuable, and (relatively) rare. Today, people just go to Walmart or Best Buy or wherever and buy a cordless phone or a wireless intercom. The typical kid gets no satisfaction learning how to build and install an intercom or a doorbell or wire up an extension phone todayt, and the competion (store bought stuff) is far superior to what he does, and readily available.

The innate interest that used to drive kids into breadboarding circuits probably drives some of them into programming, these days. And if they're interested in electronics the same way "breadboarders" were, they can fire up Spice and "breadboard" that way. No need to save pennies for the next order from Allied in Chicago or Lafayette Radio, and no need to go dumpster diving for old radios and tv sets.

Ed