ELECTRONICS FOR PHYSICISTS: DOES THE STUDIO CLASSROOM SOLVE THE PROBLEM?

摘要

There are many physicists who do not like electronics. This is because a physicist typically likes to describe nature in terms of analytical models. In electronics, this “physicist's approach” often does not work very well, since analytical models only predict the behaviour of electronic circuits to within, sometimes crude, approximation. In the words of Horowitz and Hill [1]: “electronics is a bag of tricks.” How can we teach such a bag of tricks to students who like elegant theories that can be summarized in a few equations, such as the theory of electromagnetism? The usual approach is to organize a lecture course and an accompanying practical course. In our experience this does not yield optimum results. Many students find the lectures rather boring as they seem to jump from one subject to another without a clear and coherent central theme. The practical exercises may be more challenging, but these are rarely well synchronized with the lectures. Often, the result is that physics students emerge with a dislike of electronics. As we educate our students to become applied physicists, who depend more and more on electronic (measurement) systems, we seek to remedy this situation. The studio classroom approach may provide a way to solve our problems [2]. In this approach, a class begins with a short theoretical introduction, typically lasting about 20 minutes. The students then perform some group exercises, consisting either of pen-and-paper, computer-based, or practical exercises. After completing the exercises, a new cycle starts. Thus, theory and practice are intertwined. This should optimize the learning result, as the students immediately experience how the theory taught relates to, and can be used to solve, realistic problems. In this paper, we describe the design of our studio classroom course on electronic instrumentation and we present some first results.