Teaching soldering skills (was Re: HP-IB, Amigo/cs80)

On 2/17/10, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: More particularly, I've taught several people over the past few months how to solder at a few workshops. I've had mixed results. All were enthusiastic, but not all were, in the old vernacular, "mechanically inclined". What would probably have helped is an aspect of the workshop that was specifically soldering instruction, not kit assembly, with easy to reach and easy to inspect widely spaced joints. What we had at our disposal was a few joints on 0.1" boards - either a made-in-class PCB (not my design, or I'd have made the pads bigger which would have helped) or a factory-made strip-board (Lilypad prototyping board) that was soldered to after the web of interconnections were cut to route the signals. All of the students learned *something* about soldering, but even after 90 minutes and several attempts, the success rate (good joints) was probably between 50%-66%. I had to retouch a number of joints to get the projects working during the class period. More practice would have obviously been beneficial. -ethan