Digital electronics to be offered next fall

Digital electronics, a new elective course that will be the third class added to the Project Lead the Way program, is tailored to sophomores, juniors and seniors, and will teach students about technology and give them hands-on experience in engineering.

Physics teacher Kirk Davis and math teacher Audrey Warmuth are tentatively planning on teaching this class together. The course will give students a better idea of whether they should continue pursuing engineering in college.

“This is a really useful class because kids can learn to build circuits, make things around them work and see how technology is fundamentally designed,” Davis said. 

According to Davis, one of the topics covered is the process of soldering, a technique that connects two metal joints, one with a high melting point and the other with a low melting point, and conducts electricity with them. The course will include many projects, such as building robots and controlling them with Microcontrollers, designing and testing a machine with colored LEDs and building circuits to display the student’s birth date.

The Project Lead the Way program is a project that includes electives involved with engineering. The first two electives in the series are Principles of Engineering and Introduction to Design, classes taught by Warmuth and science and math teacher Matt Welander.

According to Davis, the previous two electives are not necessarily sequential, but prior programming background is helpful. Since Digital Electronics will only be offered to upperclassmen and sophomores, Davis encourages freshmen to take Introductory to Design, a class allows students to use computers to make 3-D designs and learn how to take something flat on a page and visualize it as 3-D.

Davis enjoys digital electronics due to his fascination with digital technology and analog, topics that involve logic and trigonometric sine curves. He also enjoys figuring out how to make complicated things, such as circuits, work.

In college, Davis took chemical engineering due to his interest in electricity. In his computer science classes, he recalls “doing stuff on stone tablets back in the day.”

He didn’t have computers to run everything so he used punch cards to key in instructions. Because technology has changed since he went to college, he feels that the program trained him and provided knowledge to help him teach the course.

Davis is looking forward to giving students exposure to material that will be easier to comprehend due to its interactive learning style.

“I’m going to learn a lot, so for me, that’s really exciting,” he said. “I like teaching kids how to do something practical.”

Junior Avi Arjavalingam plans on taking this course because of his interest in engineering. He wants to “learn comprehensively about electrical engineering” through the course in comparison to trying it out on his own.

“I'm looking forward to being able to essentially make my own simple computing device because it is fascinating how you can create something so complex out of such small parts,” he said.

In preparation for the upcoming class, Davis and Warmuth attended a two week training program last summer.

“[The administration] is pretty careful about making sure we have some background in electrical engineering,” Davis said. “They want to get everybody up to speed.”

Davis is genuinely excited to teach this course due to his love for electricity.

“Electricity is kind of black magic when you think about it,” he said. “It’s really whacked out, but it’s what makes the world go around.”