AVR-Chat

I wish the problem only existed in other country's schools.  A few years ago
I supervised a 3rd year engineering student intern from a school with a
decent reputation and although he was a year away from graduating as a EE he
had never held a soldering iron and couldn't build a simple cable to link 2
serial devices.  I showed him how to solder and suggested he build some kits
to get some of the hands on experience any employer would likely expect from
him in a year.

Beyond the failure of the school to let him get that far with no real hands
on lab work, I wonder what made this kid decide he wanted to be a EE if he
had never even had the interest to do any of it.

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From: AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com [mailto:AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of Jim Wagner
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2007 2:39 PM
To: AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [AVR-Chat] atmel programmer

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I'd like to chime in here as I have in similar situation on the Freaks 
list.

Many moons ago, I was a TA in a Junior level EE design class. One of 
the students was from a fairly prestigious school in the the Middle 
East. He had studied his first two years of EE, there.

He had a big problem. All through high school, then in university, the 
emphasis was on rote memory. In his case, it was so bad that he could 
not solve this simple problem: if you have a 1000 ohm resistor 
connected across a 1mA current source, what voltage is generated across 
the resistor? He knew how to solve it when a 1V source was connected 
across the resistor. But, he could not understand this permutation of 
the problem. The reason was that he did NOT understand the concept of 
cause and effect. It was all rote, with little understanding. He knew 
how to solve it when a voltage source was involved. But, suddenly, he 
was lost with the current source.

I suspect that a number of the schools still run in this mode. That is, 
"here are the facts, learn it!". These questions appear to be very much 
in this vein. If so, its not entirely their fault. But, then again, 
they could be in another situation, and just trying to get by with the 
minimum effort. We've all known students like that. It also seems much 
more prevalent than in the past. Then, yet again, they could be trolls. 
We have no way of knowing.

I think that good advice HAS been given. But, there has been no 
response. Lets wait and see if any of them pop up with further 
question.

Jim Wagner
Oregon Research Electronics
Tangent, OR, USA



 
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