On 2/17/10, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
From trying
to teach soldering, the
unforgiving nature leads to student frustration.
I am suprised. I've taught dozens of people to solder over the years, and
every one had success within half an hour.
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