Students working with bricks

We had a group of students visiting from the Product Design Department of the Berlin University of Applied Science in our store this week. The six students and two professors were especially interested in Arduino. First, however, they wanted to learn more about the basics of electronics and decided to do the “electronics for beginners” workshop in our Maker Store.

After we provided each of them with a brick basic set, the workshop started and the group learned a lot about the structure of an electric circuit, about the functions of ground and of transistors, of capacitors and resistors or about Ohm’s law in the following two hours. The interesting part of this workshop is that participants can automatically apply theoretical knowledge in practice and by using the brick system: when they did the corresponding experiment, they immediately recognized that one of the 2 LEDs they used in their series circuits would not be as bright as the other while in a parallel circuit both LEDs would be equally bright. In this case, Ohm’s law can be put into practice and explained and understood in a vivid way.

A further experiment includes the charging and discharging of capacitor bricks. The capacitor functions like a little accumulator that can be charged and that is discharged when used. By using a jumper and the universal brick the students built a circuit that visualized this process of charging/discharging very clearly.

It was a great workshop that the students seemed to have liked – in any case will they return next week for a further workshop. This time: Arduino for beginners.