Emily Wu

The students work on labs individually, but can collaborate with their table group.

Starting this year, the school’s Digital Electronics elective has added an honors level, a change that has dramatically increased enrollment from one class period last year to three this year. In numbers, the course went from having 23 students last year to 94 this year — 90 of whom are taking honors.

The honors and regular levels are both combined in one period, but the specific course requirements vary for each level.

The elective recommends completion of either AP Computer Science or concurrent enrollment in Pre Calculus Honors or higher, so students typically take the course as juniors or seniors. It is one of the many STEM electives offered at the school, especially popular among students hoping to go into engineering after high school.

The class is designed to help students learn more about electrical and mechanical engineering — from basic digital circuits to combinational logic, clocks and microcontrollers — and it also includes rudimentary elements of software engineering.

In the fall semester, students work with breadboards, which are reusable platforms for building and testing temporary electronic circuits. 

Throughout the year, students will work on many different skills like soldering and circuiting, culminating in a project for each semester. They will create a 7-segment display for their birthday in the fall and program Arduino microcontrollers to perform a series of flashing lights at the end of second semester. 

 

Through the course, students gain hands-on experience working with tools they normally wouldn’t have been exposed to. The students recently finished their soldering unit, where they learned how to melt metal wires into a printed circuit board to create electrical connections between the different components.

“I really liked soldering, since it’s something I never worked with before,” senior Lucy Zhang said. “It feels professional and artistic at the same time.”

At the start of this school year, digital electronics teacher Thomas Wang had his students brainstorm ideas on how to differentiate between the honors and regular classes. 

Taking in feedback from the students, Wang decided that honors students would have closed note quizzes, stricter late policies and more requirements on certain projects and labs.

STEM department head Matthew Welander credits the creation of an honors class to a combination of external feedback and a lack of participation in the class.

“It was a challenge for students at different levels to be able to complete the same assignment,” Welander said. “Often someone would be behind, and someone else would get ahead, but we didn’t want to discourage students from taking the class.”

Additionally, according to Welander, the nearby schools that offer Digital Electronics are split pretty evenly between having an honors and regular class. American and Foothill High offer an honors course while Fremont and Leigh High offer a regular version. 

While students at the school have always been interested in entering electrical engineering-related fields, many were discouraged from taking Digital Electronics when there were other STEM electives which offered an AP or Honors level that would give them a GPA boost. 

With this expansion, Welander has mixed opinions on students’ motives for taking the honors classes.

“It would be great if everyone just took the classes they were interested in,” Welander said. “But of course, everyone has how it’ll look on their transcript in the back of their mind. So, I think it just makes sense to have more honors and AP course offerings at the junior and senior level.”

After learning about the honors level, several students changed their schedules to accommodate the class. 

Even if part of their motivation was initially for the honors credit, students like senior Adit Sharma, who took the course last year, said he found it helpful as he is planning to major in either mechanical or aerospace engineering. 

“Knowing how this stuff works is useful in general if you’re working anywhere in the engineering field,” Sharma said. “If something goes wrong, you already have a skillset to develop this. You won’t have to find someone else who already knows what’s going on.”