10/11/2010 Post mortem on… a birthday party part II
In part two we will fill in the blanks in between the start and the finish. The final goal is for the kids to build a working 9V long wave radio receiver from a kit. In order to do so, they need some basic learning so they can do it themselves with as little additional instruction as possible.
On verbs
In order to make the party interesting for them, I follow my own rethoric on the importance of varied activities or ‘verbs’ they should be able to undertake to enjoy the experience. These actions or verbs should be connected to the subject and have some intrinsic relevance. For the ‘capacitator’ assignment I use the classical verbs; read, understand, share knowledge, solve ‘puzzle’. For them this is the let’s-get-it-over with-bit.
The second assignment needed to address the capacitor as an electronic component. Since I wanted them to have a look inside modern equipment as well, I combined these elements into the next assignment. I had gathered some junk pieces of broken electronic equipment ( a broken beamer, a camera, handsfree set that quit working). In almost every piece of modern electronics you can find capacitors. To go beyond the ‘lets-rip-it-apart’ fn that boys of this age like anyway, I instructed them through the presentation to look for one particular item (I had found one in one of the pieces and made an image in the presentation with some text fragments). So the taking apart turned into a treasure hunt for the lost capacitor.
The other components in the radio kit have a unique shape and can not be misplaced to I decided to leave it here re. the components. Onto building circuits.
What I wanted was a simulation with circuit building with the possibility of making easy mistakes. Fortunately, some brilliant ppl created Spektro for that purpose. Low risk experimenting with real components to build working contraptions.
Since the party is always a game of ‘killing time in a fun way” and it was difficult to judge how much time each assignment would take in real life, I took four assignments from the Spektro booklets and presented them as practise tasks to perform to get ready for radio building. They get an image of the circuit and have to build that using clickable components.
This concluded the preparation phase. In order to mark this point I created a “you earned your engineer” badge by means of feedback they had completed the preparation phase.
To avoid a party where they had to sit around the table to much I had decided to have an outdoor component as well. But hey needed a valid reason to go outside. I had parked the car away in the neighbourhood with the radio kit in it. A secret agent transfer of goods. But just walking through the hood looking for our car was a bit too easy. So I decided to spice things up a bit. I told them that some agents were out there on the lookout and would hunt for them carrying Nerf guns. These are toys that shoot harmless foam projectiles. We own some ourselves so they were kitted out with Nerfs to find the car protected. And I handed out a walkie talkie so we could communicate. The game here is suggestion. First of all, there were no hunters outside (apart from his sisters who lay in ambush at the car). Second, I used the walkie tlakie to shoot fake observations and give some hints to manage the time it took to find the car.
In the presentation they got a coded message telling them to look for the car in the neighboorhood and its plate number. And a map demarkating the area.
On return, they brought home the box with the kit. Time to heat the soldering iron and mount the components one by one and fix them in place using iron and solder.
Here ends part II. Will they finish the radio? Was it fun? Did the design work? What went wrong? More in part III.
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