Teaching ground-floor digital circuits to pre-engineering students

Digital circuits pervade many applications in all engineering disciplines today. Digital circuit basics are easy to introduce early in a pre-engineering curriculum because there are no math or other technical prerequisites, and because the topic sounds glamorous to students. Presented here is a lab instrument that serves well for teaching basic, "ground-floor," digital circuits to students who have no engineering background. Also included is a teaching strategy that uses this instrument to present digital circuits in an uncomplicated and non-intimidating way. This material is suitable for high-school students, or even middle school students, and could be used in pre-engineering courses such as Project Lead the Way's Digital Electronics course. The secret to presenting digital circuits successfully to students who have no technical background is to avoid references to electricity or computers and stick purely with the 1's and 0's. In such a setting, digital circuits are just implementations of mathematical expressions. There are no "volts" or "bytes" or anything that might confuse the simplicity of 1's and 0's. By treating digital circuits simply as implementations of mathematical expressions, and treating wires as just pencil lines that connect logical elements in drawings, students can learn to design and build digital circuits comfortably. This paper provides applications of a lab station design that has been disclosed in an earlier ASEE paper1, and discusses techniques for using that station in teaching digital circuits to students who have no technical background.