Applied Engineering Classes Worked with Solderless Breadboards to Power an LED.
By Kyle McLaren
Prepare to be shocked. Students in Mr. Bertrum Johnson’s Applied Engineering classes began a different method of learning. “For me, the most important part of the education process is where it’s applicable are labs, where it’s hands-on, and remembering my schooling, I remember our lab stuff. I remember dissecting a frog and the smell of chloroform. Those things you remember. So, if you can do it with content, you’re learning and hopefully, you can apply it,” explained Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson went around to the different rows of students and placed a plastic shopping bag on each table. Each bag contained a solderless breadboard, an LED (Light Emitting Diode), a battery holder, and two 70-ohm resistors. The students worked together to build the circuit based on Mr. Johnson’s diagram. “The hardest part was probably figuring out where to begin. He gave a circuit, and I sort of understood it, just not sure how to translate it. Until I saw an example, I didn’t know what I was doing,” said Elle Curtis. “It’s a new concept in engineering. Last year was a lot of SolidWorks and this year we have new concepts to learn,” mentioned Jason Mallory.
Everyone worked to place the components on the breadboard and hoped to see their LED light up. “I was in shock! I wasn’t expecting it to work as I wasn’t sure if I was doing it correctly,” Curtis said. “When the light bulb lit up, it was awesome. I’ve never worked with electricity, and we had a great team,” Mallory said. Mr. Johnson watched as his students measured the resistance values of the resistors and calculated how many resistors they could add to the circuit before the light would burn out. “Kids understood by having the lab the resistance and parallel because it was real to them,” Mr. Johnson noted.
Mr. Johnson used to instruct students in Pennsylvania in a two-and-a-half-hour period. With a forty-seven-minute period, he learned to adapt to shorter classes. “It’s a different system. I don’t like it because, in a lab environment or CTE, we’re doing performance. You have to set up the lab and you can’t do much content for going over concepts and you have to break down early. It makes you cut your content in too short of a timeframe. If you’re doing non-performance stuff like history, that’s fine, but for labs and hands-on stuff, there’s not enough time, so you would have to schedule two periods and cut down on the number of students you could serve,” explained Mr. Johnson. Despite this, his students enjoyed his labs. “It was pretty fun. I’ve really enjoyed all the stuff he’s done with us so far. Pay attention to where you put the wires, to Mr. Johnson, and the diagrams,” Mallory said. “Trust the others in the group as they might know more than you do, and eventually you will get it,” said Curtis. Each day, Mr. Johnson’s students spent less time on the computers designing parts in SolidWorks, and instead worked with electrical components, a group of students, and learned how not to short out components and burn out an LED.