Re: How do you design a circuit?
- From: et472@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Black)
- Date: 7 Jun 2006 16:03:39 GMT
"phaeton" (blahbleh666@xxxxxxxxxxx) writes:
Great post, Chris. It was an interesting read, even!But a lot of people seem to want to know things in order to do things.
It kind of illustrates (for me anyways) how often I take the approach
backwards. Seems that for anything I've ever gotten into- music,
computer programming (pick a language), electronics, mechanical
engineering, robotics, etc.... I always go into it wanting to
"create". I absorb some of the basics readily, and then go about
diving off into the deep end and trying to do stuff well above my skill
level. Sometimes I discover things along the way, but i'm really just
'reinventing the wheel'.
It seems that i get off the most on the 'discovery' and the 'what
happens if i do *this*?' stuff, but it's probably the slowest way to
learn things. My last year of 'growth and learning' probably could
have been compressed into a 1 month course of electronics basics, if i
were to do this "like everybody else".
As far as formal education towards a degree in EE, it *is* something
i've been considering off and on for the last year, except at 33 I'm
probably too old to bother trying to get a career out of it.
-phaeton
But it's noteworthy that small children can't operate that way, because
they don't yet know the language. They have to learn by experimentation.
Just yesterday I saw someone who was banging on everything with a drumstick
(his father's a musician), and it struck me that he was trying to put
sense to the world with something he knows, the drumstick. Years ago,
I saw someone take toys out of a toybox, and pat each one, and that
seemed to be her way of examining the world. Others will lick everything
they get their hands on.
In essence, children are hackers, needed to experience the world to
learn from it. It's only when they get into school where learning
precedes doing. They cease to use their world view to learn more
about the world, they have others tell them and then they procede
from there.
And plenty of times over the years, I've seen people ask questions
in the newsgroups where if they simply tried things they could
get the answer. I'm not saying everything is solved by mere
experience, but people have become convinced they need to know
before doing, when the doing (and the making of mistakes) helps
them learn.
A couple of months ago, I did a few simple C programs. I've had
C compilers for almost twenty years, but a combination of not
having anything I needed to program and the overhead of earlier
and limited computers meant I never pursued the language more
than a bit of dabbling years ago. But I suddenly needed something,
so I learned what I needed. Having a real end use meant that I
was learning to do something, rather than abstract learning. It's
one thing to follow examples in books, but it doesn't stick if
you don't have a real use. And it helped that I've now got
a computer that's fast enough that the small programs compile in
a flash, basically the process is as simple as when I'd use a
BASIC interpreter years ago since I could get instant results.
Michael
.
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- How do you design a circuit?
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- Re: How do you design a circuit?
- From: phaeton
- How do you design a circuit?
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