Make experimental device to be a toy - the experimental teaching in Digital Logic Circuit course

Abstract

This Research-to-Practice Work in Progress paper presents a type of Digital Logic Circuit experiment device like toys to attract the students' interest for the experiments. Digital Logic Circuit course is a course that emphasizes the actual hand-on experiment. Because it is fundamental course, its experiment maybe monotonous and boring for the students. The traditional experiment is hard to attract students. In this paper, we tried to turn the experimental device to the digital toys. We divided the whole experimental device into several kinds of modular blocks, which can perfectly cover the contents of the traditional experiments and greatly improve the fun of students' experiment. The experiment integrated the traditional chip connection type experiments and the programmable device experiments. The experiment blocks were colored, like the toy blocks, and it is easy to connect, so the experimental process is very interesting. The students can do the experiment like play toys, to build a simple and interesting digital circuit. We had used this device in the Digital Logic Lab course in a small scale, the students were more willing to do the experiment than others not using this device. The results proved that this kind of experiment is beneficial to train students in improving their hardware application ability, not only in mastering the knowledge effectively, but also in strengthening the ability of practice.