Student Interview
A Year 13 Student in 2006 talks about his experience of four years of Electronics at the school.
Why did you take electronics in Year 10?
I wanted to learn more about components and the basics of electronics, to get to the stage of programming and learning about chips and stuff. I wanted to do some programming on micro-controllers and to find out what goes on inside appliances and basic stuff. So Year 10 gave me basic knowledge about electronics and the real base of what goes on.
What sort of project work did you do in Year 10?
We did a lot of assignments on components – why you use them and how you use them in a circuit. We learned how to design circuit layouts and circuit boards and make them in the machine. I liked that practical work so I wanted to learn more and more about it.
When you went into Year 11 what other subjects did you do together with your electronics?
I did maths, science, English, PE and graphics.
How was the Year 11 course different?
It was totally different. We didn't focus on the components any more. We went onto using Pickaxe – which is a small micro-controller. The whole year was based on programming and projects on that. By that time the teacher said 'here you go, this is the schematic diagram for making your printed circuit board (PCB)', we knew all about PCBs and components, how to put them on the board and solder them. We had the soldering skills, drilling and all the other skills. So we integrated all that, made the circuit and then programmed it and played around with the circuit mixture.
Basically in Year 10 we were playing around with components, whereas in Year 11 we were actually building the circuit board ourselves and programming it so that was our first year of programming. The major project was on an alarm system.
So by the end of Year 11 you had a pretty good grasp of programming the pickaxe chip.
The focus of Year 11 was learning the basics of programming and using the skills that we picked up last year to design and make the circuit board for the alarm project.
How did you pick up those skills?
Mr Collis gave us notes, he'd show us, and then it was just practice and more practice. The notes are on the website, so if you wanted to check up on how anything was done you go straight to that. That site was really useful because we had a lot of projects and upcoming projects on the site and he'd say something like 'in term 3 we'll do an LED assignment' and it would all be on the site.
So then you moved into Year 12.
I knew by that stage that I wanted to do Electronics in Year 12 and 13. My other subjects in Year 12 were graphics, physics, maths and English and PE again, In Year 13 instead of English I picked up geography. In Year 12 there were two assignments. I had a stakeholder that needed an alarm for a shop and in the other one we had to design some form of a game using a two line LCD display.
With that range of subject choices had you decided fairly early on what you wanted to do when you left school?
I've always liked technology and gadgets and stuff like that, so electronics and probably graphics were the subjects most useful in hands-on fields of design and technology. And it gives a good mixture of design and knowing what goes on inside technology. Now I know a bit more about what is available I've decided to do engineering at Auckland Uni or AUT – it'll depend on whether I can meet the entry requirements. I'm thinking of majoring in telecommunications. I keep in touch with what's going on through websites – there's a lot of hobby websites and forums I keep visiting and looking at what people are doing all over the world.
Have you been pleased with the results you've been getting?
The NCEA results seem to be mostly based on the paperwork, which is kind of fair because all they need to see is how you have gone through it all and evaluated it. But it's sad that they can't see the real thing. But that's the way it is.
Looking at the Year 13 project. You've got Mr Collis as your client. What made you settle on that particular project?
Well to start with I didn't want to do something that would be too easy. For two or three weeks I had no real ideas so Mr Collis came up with the idea of making a classroom timer. This block is situated far away from the other blocks and there's a lot of construction noise around and you can't really hear the bell. So he said 'why don't you make a bell?' and I said 'Sir, it's the same thing as last year' and he said 'well we'll make it with a big display and with lots of other features that'll make it different'. He said exactly what he wanted and it was a real life thing. It will be used every day
What difficulties have you had with the project?
Well I've never dealt with such a big LCD before – a 240x64 pixel module. It took me nearly half a term to get the wiring right. For the first three quarters of the year all I'd done is put in an LCD screen, played with it and tried to get some fonts and letters on it. Then I tried with the keypad to make it work, tried it with a speaker, and so on. Then I took all these components and made them work. It was frustrating but it was challenging because no one else is doing this sort of thing at the moment.
So the challenge has just been to get it to work you weren't tempted to just say 'forget it'?
No, that was never an option. I wanted to do this project and I am doing it, and I didn't want to look for easy short cut other ways of finishing it. I did spend a lot of time doing it but it was worth it in the end.
Are you confident that the end product is going to meet the specification?
I wouldn't say fully, but to the client's satisfaction – yes. There were a lot of extra features Mr Collis wanted – like changing the time for like leap years – that I couldn't put in because I ran out of time. But all that fancy stuff wasn't really the main stuff – we've just focused on doing the basic timer
You've been dealing with Mr Collis as a client, so you've got ready access to him every day if required; that must have been quite important.
It would have been a lot harder if I'd had a client across the other side of Auckland – really hard. There would have been a lot of travelling involved. Some of it could be done by email, but the client would really have to see it and feel it and touch it. You can't just say 'I've put in the LCD; is that OK?' because they'll want to see it – it's their thing not my thing and I want to do it the way they want it.
What have you enjoyed about working with a client?
Its really good to know what people out there want these days and to find out what's not already on the market and give that to them. It's like 'Ha, ha! I'm the first one to do this' and it really gives you a bit of excitement. And it's good to work with components and things that you've never used before – I've never used this LCD or a keypad and I've never used this chip before.
You've had a lot of fun doing the problem solving bit what about documentation?
That's been really hard but I've been doing it the way Mr Collis said and I keep going back to the stakeholder consultation and referring back to the specifications. If I make changes I always say what I've done and why I've done it and it's been good for me to be able to go back and see things that I've changed and why they've been changed. Putting down everything your client says shows why you did things that way. In real life you don't want everything to be just in the back of your head – it has to be written down. And it means that someone else can look at it and not make the same mistake.
Looking at the electronics knowledge and skills you've gained over the last four years how do you feel that it has prepared you for the outside world?
Well its taught me practical basic electronics. At engineering school we're going to be using the chip I've already dealt with, so I've got a good base for that. And I won't have to learn about AVR from scratch like students from other schools – I'll have done it for two years. In our school we're able to do both the theoretical and the practical side.
What about the stuff that you do in Physics and the stuff you do in Electronics?
In Year 13 we did a lot of stuff in Physics that we'd covered in Electronics. Like this year we've done Kirchhoff's laws and we did that back in Year 10 Electronics. In Physics its much more just writing things down and I'm lucky I've already done all the practical testing in Electronics. In Physics we do small experiments but that doesn't really help. In electronics you get to do more practical stuff, test out all the theory, get your hands on it and learn why thing go wrong.
The classes also operate a bit differently. There wouldn't be as much movement around your physics class room?
No it becomes a bit of a discipline issue, because teachers think you're not working properly or even cheating. But over here we help each other and we learn stuff that way. If Alex, say, was working with motors, and I'm not and have to do something with motors I'd go to him and ask what he thinks and he'll teach me about it. Even in classes like graphics there's not same level of interaction – because everyone is basically just drawing and its not like you can teach someone else how to draw.
It doesn't strike me that electronics is any easier than other Year 13 subjects.
No it certainly is not. You can see how much I've struggled getting all this to work. I could have just quit and changed my subject – there's lots of easier ones around. Every day in electronics is different and you learn different stuff each day. In electronics we get a chance to play with all this cutting edge technolog – its not easy, but its fun. As you say there are no 'right answers' in the back of a text book, its always trial and error. And in the end, you can't beat the feeling of actually finishing a project and seeing it being used by a client.
I'm just looking forward to doing more of the stuff like we're doing just now – it'll probably mean bigger challenges though.
