My only real
complaint with it as a teaching tool was that even though
I did all the projects, there was no abstraction of the underlying
concepts presented.
I agree. They also didn't do a good job of clarifying that the
device only implemented combinatorial logic. As I recall, I got
THis is, alas, a major failing of a lot of the educational kits. THose
n-in-1 electronics kits were poor at this too. Not only did they rarely
give a proper explanation of the circuit operation, but in some cases the
circuits were designed round the components in the kit and were quite hard
to understand.
Possibly the best educational kits were those produced by Philips. There
were the IR (Interphone Enginner) and RE (Radio Engineer) kits that
assembled to make a 2-station wired intercom and an AM radio respectively
(using screw terminals, no soldering), nothing more. But there were at
least 3 other seires that I've come across :
EE (Electronic Enginner). These were good in that you handled real
components, they were not pre-mounted on the kit's baseboard. So you
learnt the resistor colour code early on :-). The compoennts were
connected together by spring terminals that you fitted to an insulating
baseboard, orgiinally hardboard, later plastic. The early kits used
germanium transistors with long leads that were connected up in the same
way, later kits had transistors (and later still varicap diodes, FETs,
LEDs, etc) on little PCBs that fitted onto the terminals.
You got some quite interesting components in the kits. THings like audio
driver and output transformers, and a matched pair of transistors to make
quite reasonable amplfiiers. IF transformers, oscillator coil and a
2-gang variable capacitor to make superhet radios. (I think one of the
later kits had a circuit for a varicap-tuned FM radio). One of the
smaller kits made a auio-frequency signal generator using a pair of RF
oscillators and a diode to mix them non-linearly, a larger kit made a
wein brisge oscillator with a lamp to stabilise the gain. I am told (but
never had) that one of the kits had a pre-mounted CRT (with a ready-built
HV supply) to act as a simple 'scope, another kit added a TV tuner module
so you could make a simple black-and-white TV (!)
Anyway...
ME (mechanical engineer) kits were plastic plates and disks + metal rods.
You could put pins into the disks to make gear wheels, there was a small
electric motor in the kit too. What made them more interesting (for the
time, late 1960's) was that you could control the mechanical models
(motor/lamps) using the components in the EE kits. So you could make a
car that would turn on its headlights when it got dark or something.
And finally, to get this on-topic (sort of)
CL kits. These were computer educational kits. The basic module was a
plastic box with 3 input sockets, one output socket (with a lamp to
monitor the sate) and 8 'programming' sockets. By wiring up the latter
appropriately you could get the module to act as any 3-input gate. If
you wanted a flip-flop, you could either corss-couple 2 modules, or feed
the ouptut back to an input on the same module programmed as an AND-OR gate.
Alas the smallest kit (all I have) only contaiend 2 logic modules and one
battery/input switch module, whuch wasn't enough to do much with.
-tony
