[carlmr]

>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models.

Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

[sevensor]

My biggest criticism of EE pedagogy is that it tends to proceed from abstractions and then derive the whole world. This makes it a bit of a slog for a lot of students. I’d like to see an application-first approach that builds up principles from observed behavior. Like, measure the slip in an induction motor and then work out what’s going on there, instead of deriving motors from Maxwell’s equations.

[carlmr]

That's a good point, too, I had a bunch of abstractions without applications in my head.

[wetwater]

Its interestine, when you say abstractions. Could you explain what you mean by abstractions in this context and what do you mean by the underlying fundamentals.

[carlmr]

One example would be resonant circuits. Ok great you can build resonant circuits, but what for? The fundamentals to understand frequency responses came later in signals and systems. The application came much later when I learned about electric motors, which basically behave like low pass filters (resonant circuits) which enables us to use PWM to generate sine shaped current curves by switching the input voltage on and off. The voltage signal is smoothed by the LPF circuit that is the motors windings.

I think it would have helped me if we talked about the motor or other examples first, and then did some math to show how the resonant behavior can be useful.

[sevensor]

It’s crazy that VFDs work! You have to have a really good ground though, or you get arcing through the bearings.

[renox]

I remember having two class about networking, the first one was top down, it was awful, the second one was bottom up, everything clicked.

[imtringued]

Why is bottom up or top down needed? Why can't you just explain everything at a high level first and then get into the details?

[idiotsecant]

There isn't enough time. A leisurely exploration from observations is what you do on your own time. School has a certain amount of material to convey in a certain time. That means learn the axioms and rules as best you can and get to work paying off that enormous student loan.

[tekla]

Massive waste of time. So much happens in a way that is not intuitive nor easily observable that starting from the math is much better.

[bee_rider]

The blog post describes the problem with this strategy, I think—the author was already pulled over to the CS side because they could just throw together a web app that people could actually interact with, day one.

If you start with easy circuit models, at least the labs can put together something tangible in the first couple semesters, to keep people interested.

And, I mean, a lot of engineering students end up going into sort of technician-y jobs, so keeping the hands-on spark alive has a lot of value, IMO.

[sevensor]

So set your sights lower? A lot of BS EEs exit the process understanding neither Maxwell’s equations nor which end of a soldering iron to hold. The degree demonstrates that they are good at abstract symbol manipulation, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not very intellectually fulfilling and it filters out a lot of people who could be good engineers.

[korse]

Don't forget, Faraday hated math.

[ahartmetz]

Teaching solutions without even mentioning the problems, basically. I hate it.

[stephen_g]

Yeah, this kind of idea is why I’m dead against using things like the hydraulic analogy in early EE for anyone who is ever going to want to do more than the ‘hook some things up to an Arduino’ (or probably ESP32 these days) kind of level electronics.

The gaps between the analogy and the real world actually make it harder to understand the fundamentals and just confuse people when you get to a deeper level understanding. It requires more unlearning than is worth it for the slight benefit of making the concepts slightly more intuitive to understand at the beginning.

[junon]

Once I ditched the hydraulic analogy and really tried to internalize charge, current, voltage, etc. is when I finally started to understand why the hydraulic analogy "works" but only for people who already understand electricity.

Electricity behaves in many ways just like water (just at a significantly faster time scale) but I don't think it actually helped me learn how it all worked to start with.

[r_lee]

This is a common problem in all fields IMO. It's easy for many to fall into the "It's like X" but it only makes sense if you already have the information needed in your head to connect the dots

Which is why I also don't generally like analogies and the kind

[foobarchu]

This reminds me a lot of the car analogy that gets used to (poorly) teach object oriented programming.

[therealcamino]

I had a CS professor as an undergrad who would teach a couple of advanced seminars in his own research area. His approach to those simplifications was to announce, "I'm going to lie to you now, but just go with it and I promise that later we're going to learn the real truth." I liked that as a compromise, to make some practical progress, but not to mistake the simplification for full understanding. (And he wasn't rigid about it -- if somebody would ask a deeper question he'd happily answer it to some level and then get on with his plan.)

[bee_rider]

The hydraulic analogy always sort of confused me because, like, fluid mechanics are real complicated. So, I always had this gut feeling question of like, can we actually end up with a hydraulic analogy that is exactly as complicated and electricity and magnetism? If we push the analogy beyond what is intended?

Is it an analogy or are both models expressions of some underlying model of potentials and flows, and we happen to have more hands-on experience with water?

[antod]

Yeah. As I mentioned in another comment, as someone who studied Civil Engineering (ages ago) maybe most EEs never learn enough hydraulics to know the analogy probably goes further than they realize - ie much further than just kids level stuff.

Voltage drops across components or look a like head drops across pipe fittings. Losses along a pipe are similar to wires. Head and flow rate are very similar to voltage and current across multiple paths. Kirchoff can apply to both etc.

Many of the quantities have direct parallels and derive from each other in similar ways.

Obviously there are limits. But my middling DC circuit knowledge helped a lot when learning hydraulics from a mathematical engineering perspective.

[antod]

Heh, I used electrical circuit analogies when learning hydraulics for pipe networks in Civil Engineering. I struggled much less than the other students who didn't know any basic electrical stuff from physics classes.

[marcosdumay]

Hum... The hydraulic analogy is for school kids to learn what electricity is. If you are creating circuits to hook into an arduino, you should have moved from it already.

[kevin_thibedeau]

It is a flawed analogy but it behaves like a fluid more than most realize:

https://youtu.be/2AXv49dDQJw?feature=shared&t=1248

[marcosdumay]

Electricity behaves a lot like a fluid. But not much like water or air, so there's little point in using it as an intuitive analogy.

[lukan]

I believe school kids should be already creating circuits and hooking them up to arduinos.

[not_that_d]

I feel insulted.

[marcosdumay]

Instead, if you still use it, just drop it because it's probably holding you back.

And if you managed to move ahead in hard mode, you shouldn't feel insulted.