Thinking Machines
The students opened class with a question “How do machines think?”
This was unexpected, but opportune as we had recently finished a segment on space and were ready to move to a new topic: circuits and electronics! For this very first intro session, we conceptually touched on the nature of electricity, the difference between analogue and digital signals, the significance and composition of transistors, and logic gates.
The students learned that logic gates can be used to manipulate signals to trigger desired effects (this, conceptually speaking, is part of how machines “think”) and they learned that all logic gates can be created using a couple transistors. The students readily absorbed all this material, noting down gates and truth tables in their notebooks. By the end of class, they were solving logic gate puzzles posed by the instructor with gusto. In following classes, the students will be given real electronics kits to explore and experiment with digital circuitry.