Due at 9:05 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 2

1. Read the syllabus

The syllabus captures lots of important information. Please read the whole thing from head to toe before our Wednesday class so that we’re all on the same page. A link to the webpage version of the syllabus is available under the “reference” header on the left navigation bar; if you prefer a PDF (which makes for slightly prettier reading), that’s available here.

I’ll give a little oral quiz at the start of class Thursday on some points addressed in the syllabus. I’m going to call on people at random. If I get the sense that people haven’t read it, we’ll need to use class time Thursday to go over policy stuff, which I’d love not to have to do. So: please read it!

This is the eighth semester that I’ve been teaching this class, so there are seven semesters’ worth of prior student work to check out to get a sense of the sorts of projects people have made.

Please take a look at some (or all, if you’re feeling motivated) of the prior semesters’ student work, and find a particular Project 2: Assistive Device for Yourself or Final Project: Assistive Device for a Client that you’d like to share with the class. Find one that’s especially interesting, effective, surprising, intriguing, or for any reason you’re drawn to. (Not sure where to look for prior semesters’ pages? In the navigation column on the left ← click on “Previous Semesters.”)

In class on Thursday, we’ll go around the room and you’ll have ~30 seconds to talk about that project and why you wanted to share it. Your job isn’t to advocate for it per se—just introduce it to the room and then we can briefly discuss it.

You don’t need to submit anything for this; just be prepared to identify your project of interest when I call on you on Thursday.

As you may recall from today’s visitor Sara Longo, and from this section of the syllabus, this semester we’re conducting some research on improving student documentation and physical computing learning. If you choose to contribute, you will be helping us create better and richer materials for student learning, aaaaaaand as an added bonus, prticipants will get a $25 gift certificate at the conclusion of the semester. To sign up for the study, please fill out this short-and-sweet form (link has been updated post-class 8/31).

4. Do some asynchronous learning on electronics

In total, these sum to 1 hour 15 minutes of lectures. Please watch them in order, either here on this page or on YouTube. Feel free to speed them up or slow them down, of course.

These lectures cover some important elementary ideas behind electronics, including how we can draw schematics to represent circuits and the basic mathematics that describe electrical flow in a circuit. (Starting on Thursday, we’ll put these ideas into action, but for now, it’s just going to be some stage-setting theory.)

If you feel like you know this stuff already, you are welcome to watch the videos at high speed, and/or skip ones that cover familiar material.

In any case, take notes and be sure to actually try to figure things out as I ask you to in the videos! If you just sit and watch as drool comes out of the corner of your mouth, odds are you’re not going to emerge from the hour of video much wiser.

a. Electronics: schematic basics (video 16) (14 minutes)