From memory, Anita Vimpani, a friend of mine who was studying fourth year civil engineering, was the very first person mentioned the School Technology Studies Project when I was in third year electrical engineering. She enjoyed it and pointed out that the work load was not too much. Later, Chris Penna, the coordinator of the subject came to speak to us in a Circuit Theory III lecture. I then found out being an overseas student was not an obstacle to participate in the project. Dr. Keogh who was taking the lecture also encouraged us to consider the subject. My interest started to grow. Though I did not hate engineering subjects and also knew which combination of subjects could give me the best marks, going out to a school to help still sounded an attractive for a person like me who was 'trapped' in University for so long. I learnt gradually as I grew up that the path of the least resistance might not be best way to travel. If I did not choose the School Technology Studies project, most likely Switching and Signaling was the alternative. As I specialized in the power/control side of electrical engineering, this subject did not mean much to me except it was an easy subject. Moreover, I wished to make the most out of the years that I spent in Australia, not just from my 'professional/technical training' for my parents paid for both my living cost and University fees. I thought that being in Australia was also something that I should take advantage of. In the summer holiday following third year, I went back to Hong Kong to fulfill my vacation employment requirement. In the mean time, I also asked my parents advice on choosing the subject. The answer was positive.
After exam in my fourth year, first semester, I approached Chris Penna. He outlined the requirement of the course and asked in what way I could see myself helping a school. A few ideas came up to mind. When I was young, I spent a lot of time on an APPLE ][+ compatible computer and digital electronics. I was also aware of the fact that most electrical engineering students did not specialize in power/control and power systems surely had a lot of implication to this technological world. At the beginning of second semester, Chris arranged me to Rowville Secondary College to work with Barry Bowling, the teacher who was in charge of technology studies. I felt quite strange before Chris and I went to the school as we had no idea who the teacher was. The first impression that I had on Barry was that he was a nice and friendly person, very helpful. It was a relief. He had been teaching technology studies for years and did know a fair bit about electronics. One unfortunate thing was that the classes he run involved analog circuits, rather that digital, which was not something that I was confident in. The way he taught the students was to expose them to electronics first to arouse their interest, and then told them about the background required. He suggested that the class needed to do some testing and I might be able to help on putting together a multimeter manual. This was my first visit to the school.
Chris told me that those who engaged in this project often contributed little for the first few week at the schools. This was the time of exploring the school and found out how one could help in a specific way. I visited the school again and observed the Year eleven class which I would spend my time with. There were eleven students in the class, four of them studied automobile and the rest electronics. They had nearly no knowledge on how circuits worked, but by following their textbook "Funway into Electronics" (3 volumes), they were able to construct complicated circuits without understanding the theory to fulfill their VCE production requirement. The circuits could be brought in packages from Dick Smith Electronics and construction of circuits usually involved soldering components onto a printed circuit board. I picked up a circuit diagram of the production that one of the student was working on and found that the main part of the circuit was composed of three bandpass filters. I asked myself how I can explain the theory to them as bandpass filter appeared for the first time in third year and it was important to had two years of engineering background to understand it. That was why testing of a circuit was so hard for them. Barry did agree that basic circuit theory should be introduced and he mentioned that the water tank model in which voltage was the pressure of the water and the flow of the water was the current might be useful. I was not familiar with this model at all and he gave me a textbook from a B. E. C. (Basic Electronics Certificate) course ran by Swinburne College of TAFE as a reference. I also observed the atmosphere in the classroom. Students were hard to control but Barry was patient with them. He used his authority with respect to his students and supported his commands with reasons. Barry was frank to me and said that the students in the class did not have a lot of motivation as they chose the subject because they did not want to choose other ones. I did worry how I could control the class. This was my second visit to the school.
After this visit, I went back home to devise a timetable. First of all I investigated the model used to explain electricity. The BEC textbook used the water tank model. Nevertheless, the electron model was the most widely used model and another textbook was found on this topic. Moreover, this was the model my teacher used when I was taught electricity for the first time. In term of helping the students to gain insight to the circuit in testing, the water tank model was simple in explaining capacitor related circuits. However, when it came to transistor, it was very hard. (Transistor was hard by itself already because sometimes it was used as a switch and other times it was an amplifier.) On the other hand, the electron did not have a particular advantage or disadvantage on explanation of the operating principles of components. I went around the electrical department to find some help in systemic approach to diagnostic practices but I found that it was really an art and people learnt from experience. Another thing was that the undergraduate handbook said that 80 hours of work was expected and just helping students in diagnostic practices did not seem to be enough. Barry also mentioned in a causal way that a demonstration with the CRO (Cathode Ray Oscilloscope) would be good. However, the strength of the CRO could not be seen easily without a source of periodic waveform. Knowing that most of the class had constructed a circuit called the "Ding-Dong Doorbell", it seemed that the circuit was solution of the source the periodic waveform. However, the circuit had to be explained to the students and I estimated that electrical engineering students should be able to understand the circuit after two years of education according to the syllabus in Monash. The strength of the water tank model could be exploited in this case as the circuit used capacitors to create oscillation and a timing circuit. A water tank model of the circuit was developed and found to be a good way to present the mechanism involved. Modification of the circuit was also possible once the circuit was explained. It seemed to be a wise decision to choose the water tank model but I was skeptical at time throughout the project and kept the scope of my discussion within the "explanable" area of the model. A timetable was thus developed as below.
Then I wrote up the first presentation. I assumed that the students knew nothing about electricity and started from the very beginning. I felt nervous a few hours before the presentation and did nearly no work. In the actual presentation, the class was unexpectedly quiet. I was not comfortable to take the position of a teacher as the students were not much younger than me. I tended to treated them in a more equal level like what I did when I led cell group (a group of students came together to discuss issues) in clubs at University. However, it did not seem to work. Since I did not study Year eleven in Australia, I underestimated their understanding in electricity. I was glad that I found out all these in the first presentation. I also found that using overhead projector was not a good idea as it took time to set up. After the presentation, Barry suggested to me that visual checks might be too simple and the students knew a bit about it already. So I agreed to change the next topic to introduction to multimeter. I took four set of "Funway 1 Kits" which consisted of a board with holes and electronic components could be assembled by putting screws in the holes and putting the wire between the screw and the flat surface of the board. The fourth week passed.
Initially, I decided to digest the material in the manual and wrote a simplified manual for the students. However, I found that the manual was not too hard to understand and it would be useful for student to learn how to dig information from a manual as they would sure meet another one in their life. The handout for the next three lesson (two on multimeter, one on diagnostic practices) were prepared. The four board were constructed and found to be a tedious job which took about a bit more than one hour to simple circuits for lighting up LEDs. In the lesson, we went through the manual and I asked some questions to make the atmosphere interactive. The class was then split into four groups and each of them received a multimeter and a circuit board so that they could measure the voltage across all the components. However, some students did not seem to understand much as they used the multimeters. The way that some of the multimeters were used really made me wonder how effective my teaching was. Some of the students behaved like they had never read the manual, or they just did what they thought was correct, disregarding the manual. The class was very hard to control once they were divided and they did their own task. Although the handout had clear instructions but most of them did not like to read and I had to tell them what was printed. Personally, I was not too organized and there were gaps in the presentation in which I had to fetch multimeters and power packs from the store room. One thing that I was glad was the depth of the material seemed to be alright, and more practical work and asking more question seemed to be appropriate.
In the next week the class was asked to measure resistance of different things with the multimeter. Most of the students knew how to read colour codes on resistors but they were very careless especially when it came to the exponential bit. When they measured the resistance of their own body, they started to measure between points that I never ever imagined like across the brain. That student did that whenever he got hold of a multimeter afterward. Control and guidance of the class improved by approach one group of students at a time, not the whole class. I started to feel more confident in class.
To motivate the class more, the idea of competition between teams to find faults in the circuit was born. To execute this idea, I went back to the electrical department for help. I tried to put fault in a wire without damaging the insulation so that using multimeter was nearly the only way to find the fault. I got one lecturer and a laboratory technician to help but the suggestion they made did not work. By the way, this lecturer, unlike Dr. Keogh, knew nothing about this School Technology Studies Project and was skeptical about how worthwhile the subject was. I was also told that LED could be made 'dead' by putting 20 to 30V across it without any damage to its appearance. When I tried it out, I gradually increased the voltage from zero up to a bit less that 20V across the LED and smoke started to come out. With care, the damage could be checked visually. I found out that it was better to applied 30V across instantly. I seldom had the privilege to investigate how to destroy electronic components with a non-mischievous purpose. I set up the circuits so that one of them only need visual check to debug all the faults and the other one need a multimeter. I did not have enough material so that the class had to split up into two groups. A briefing was given at the start in finding faults and the importance of visual checks was emphasized. The power supply should not be turn on before all the possible tests that did not require power was done. However, the first thing they did when they got the circuit board was to connect to the power supply! One unexpected outcome was that the group that comprised of the 'smarter' students (sort of smart at times) did not co-operate with each other and did not finish before the end of class while the other group finished more than ten minutes ago. General speaking, the electronics knowledge that the students had was limited. For example, some of the students did not even able to tell the anode and cathode of a diode. I thought that they were responsible in knowing the basics. Another thing was that as I failed to put fault in a wire, I put nail mark and cut the insulation of the wire by a cutter to make it look torn and old but it was still conducting. I thought that they would at least be suspicious of a fault in the wire, but no one actually took any care. To increase participation, the usual four groups arrangement would work better.
After the competition, I did not have the time to produce the handouts for the rest of the lessons together and had to type them when the lesson was close. The next lesson was changed slightly from introduction of the Ding-Dong Doorbell to something more basic - capacitor. The mechanism in the doorbell would be explained when it was tested by the CRO, rather that presenting the theory first. The choice of word in the handout was poor due to the amount of time available in preparation. It is then harder in the class to tell the students what to do. At times I had to demonstrate to them in each group what I wanted. After class, I tested the specially constructed Ding-Dong Doorbell with the CRO at the school. The CRO was never touched before and was an advance one. I determined the value of the components that I used in modification of the circuit and attenuated the volume of the speaker so that my voice would be audible when the bell was on.
I decided to split the demonstration of the CRO into two lessons, and reserve the last lesson for conclusion and evaluation. I planned to split the class into two groups so that everyone could see the CRO easily. However, when I walked into the classroom, less that half of the class was presented and I wondered why. Of course I did not split the class up and I finished the demonstration early. The students could actually understand such a complicated circuit. Barry told me that the school decided to stop the Year twelve Technology Studies due to limit amount of funding and so some of the students were away from class. I heard him mentioning before that the school wanted to shorten the time that students spent in class but never expected the matter turned out to be such a disaster. From the start I knew that the school did not encourage student to take this subject otherwise students would not choose the subject only because there were no other subjects that they like. Barry also told me the number of students in music was low but the school decided to go ahead. Obviously the school did not see the significance of the subject and clung to the traditional idea of important subjects. I was just disappointed but I knew that to Barry it was his career. I did not know what to say.
Due the workload I had, I had to cancel the conclusion and evaluation lesson and handed out the questionnaires after the finished up the CRO demonstration at the end of the second lesson. And this was the last presentation. However, I needed a few books in the school to write up my report and I promised Barry that I would give him a copy to the revised handout and extra notes (the technical name of the whole thing was called Curriculum Package) and also to help him to gain confident in using the CRO.
The subject required me to do a fifteen minutes presentation in the University. I misread the information given and did not turn up to the presentation on Tuesday. I had to hand in my final year engineering project on the same week and it was not feasible for me to do a presentation on Tuesday anyway. Chris was able to squeeze me into the Friday presentation slot and I was very grateful to be able to present. It was like gaining something that I was lost and I did take the advantage of putting my enthusiasm into the presentation. I also handed in my project in the morning so that I could concentrate on the presentation. The talk went well. In the presentation, I heard experience from students working at other school. Most of the school had a better culture towards Technology Studies and the outcome of the projects were better. However, I did not regret that I was arranged to Rowville Secondary College and saw the negative side of the picture. The week after was the last week of University I had as an undergraduate, (hopefully) and I worked on my assignment until half past four on Friday.
After exam, I still had to do a presentation of my final year project and finish the Curriculum Package and the report that I am now typing. I had to turn down a number of social activities from my friends and worked hard. I found the writing the Curriculum Package a particular difficult task (even more difficult than the final year project presentation) as I did not know what knowledge the audience had. The package turned out to require a fair amount of physics background to understand. The first draft was handed in on Monday and Friday was the due day for the package and the report. The presentation was on Wednesday. I did not have a lot of motivation and felt tired very easily. However, since I was more used to presentation than any other time in my life, I did what I wanted in the presentation. Also I felt more comfortable and succeeded to make the talk less tense for everyone with humour that I had. After not feeling easily with the water tank model for a while, I was able to accept the idea of using analogy to explain concepts though it sacrificed the details. So I made most (I think) people understood the result from a research paper that took me hours to work out its meaning. I did not really expect my experience in the School Technology Studies Project to help this soon.
I handed out questionnaires in the class of eleven but there were only six responses. Some of the students might have already left at that stage. The statistics was shown below:|
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| 1. | What is your overall impression of the presentations? | ||||||
| 2. | How much do you learn? | ||||||
| 3. | How useful is the material presented? | ||||||
| 4. | Is the depth of the presentation appropriate?
Is it too hard or too easy? |
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| 5. | Is the pace of the presentation just right? | ||||||
| 6. | Has the material been arranged in a logical fashion? | ||||||
| 7. | Are the key ideas clearly explained? | ||||||
| 8. | Is my voice audible? Is my pronunciation understandable? | ||||||
To sum up, I enjoyed the subject very much though the amount of work that I put in was a bit over my expectation. Now I gain more confident in explaining analog circuit to 'circuit illiterates'. (as in computer illiterates) However, I do not recommend analog circuit to be used in Technology Education as a main component as the theory behind is hard. Digital electronics is the way to go. I still have not complete finish the project as I have promised Barry to help. Unfortunately, he is very busy at the moment and all that I can do is to return the books and components and give him a copy of the Curriculum Package.