Development of Digital Electronics: how veteran teachers took on a new challenge

Three years ago, when math teacher Audrey Warmuth entered the former woodshop room that was to be turned into the school’s engineering room, she braced herself for the heap of unused garbage. With one glance and a waft of the pungent smell, Warmuth realized how much worse the room’s condition actually was.

“The building was not actually used as a classroom for years [after] woodshop was shut down,” Warmuth said. “It was just a mess. People were using it just for storage and a place to keep machines.”

The stained and dusty tables lay hidden under piles of machinery and the robotics team’s storage items. Worst of all, the paint room, a small separate room in the corner of the space, had the toxic smell of years-old paint.

Now, three years after first setting up the classroom, the room is in better condition, but Warmuth and co-teacher Matt Welander have had to prepare for yet another new class in it starting this fall: Digital Electronics. With nearly 60 students currently enrolled, Digital Electronics is geared at students who are interested in electrical engineering.

Although Warmuth and Welander have been teaching here for several years, they returned to square one after agreeing to teach the new class.

 

The curriculum

The 60 students are divided into two classes. Warmuth and Welander each teach one class of Digital Electronics.

According to Warmuth, the class’s software and projects are  designed to complement the school’s Introduction to Engineering and Design and Principles of Engineering classes.

The classes are part of an eventual four-year sequence, in which students take increasingly difficult classes and then graduate from the program with an extensive engineering background. Currently, the prospective fourth year of engineering, in which students would have the freedom to analyze any problem and build a potential solution, is in the planning stages.

The class sequence starts with Introduction to Engineering and Design, a course that teaches students basic engineering software and continues with Principles of Engineering, a class that touches over each of the several types of engineering. The current sequence ends with Digital Electronics, in which students apply previously acquired knowledge to create personalized projects applicable to everyday issues.

 

The teachers prepare

In order to implement Digital Electronics, both Warmuth and Welander were required to participate in the two-week Project Lead the Way (PLTW) program at San Jose State University (SJSU) this past June.

According to its website, PLTW is “the nation’s leading provider in STEM programs,” which includes Digital Electronics. For SHS to receive assistance from PLTW throughout the school year, the teachers had to be  certified by the program.

Warmuth and Welander received their certification after completing a two-week summer course at SJSU that reminded them of their time in college.

“In the evening, we would get together to do homework and make lesson plans,” Warmuth said. “It was just like [we were] actual students; sometimes, while we’re working, we would get off topic, and then we would have to steer ourselves back to work.”

Six other teachers, most from California, participated in the program with them. The teachers grew close and were able to relive their college memories through the program.

“It’s kind of funny to have been living in the dorms,” Warmuth said. “It’s really funny as an adult, as a married woman, to say to someone, ‘Are you coming to my room, or are we going to your room?’”

But it wasn’t all fun and games.

Warmuth said that the program not only helped them build the course, but also taught them more about the technicalities of the curriculum.

Originally their outline for the class was extremely broad, filled with difficult concepts they needed to re-learn. With the help of the SJSU program, they gained enough confidence with the material to teach it.

“It was helpful for me to see what the curriculum for the class was,” Welander said. “Before, we couldn’t really see. We just had a vague understanding of it.”

Although they now have a complete curriculum, they plan to add extra labs.

“It’s a matter of us looking through the curriculum really closely, seeing where the holes are and then trying to think about how to plug those holes in terms of a continuum of learning, understanding, developing and designing,” Warmuth said.

 

Bringing it to SHS

The next step was to obtain the appropriate materials that students would need for their projects, as the district’s rules request that teachers ask for needed classroom materials by July 1.

For Warmuth, attending the SJSU program and receiving materials were simple compared to the hurdle of turning a smelly storage room into a usable classroom three years ago.

After working for nearly three years to slowly clean the room “one table at a time,” Warmuth and Welander deemed the room to be usable by all of the engineering students. Despite making significant progress, the two were not entirely pleased.

“We’re still going to try to change some of these corner rooms into offices, and we also want more 3D printers,” Warmuth said. “A lot of our issues and goals revolve around not just creating a new curriculum, but getting the physical room up to where we want it to be.”

An important feature that Warmuth hopes will be added to the room soon is climate control. On cooler  days, students find themselves uncomfortable due to a lack of heating. Some students even bring their own personal heaters.  

While making final preparations for the class in late July and August, Warmuth and Welander again found themselves mirroring the lives of typical college students. On a daily basis, the two set aside approximately an hour each day to learn the new software, Multisim, which is used in the Digital Electronics.

As they would spends hours upon hours learning the new software and building the curriculum, they had a slight fear at the back of their mind: What if nobody signed up?

A few weeks before school started, they anxiously opened the document with the student roster to learn that both classes were almost full. They felt at once relieved and excited, pleased that their work had paid off.

“We cannot explain how happy we are with the turnouts of this class,” Warmuth said. “We can’t wait to see how the students make use of it.”