Comments on: Should Your Honor Student be in Shop Class? http://innocuous.org/articles/2009/06/17/should-your-honor-student-be-in-shop-class/ Richard Tibbetts on Various Topics Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:26:21 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Jered Floyd http://innocuous.org/articles/2009/06/17/should-your-honor-student-be-in-shop-class/comment-page-1/#comment-32 Jered Floyd Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:37:50 +0000 http://innocuous.org/articles/2009/06/17/should-your-honor-student-be-in-shop-class/#comment-32 Readily perceived failure isn't the only value in working with your hands, and in fact the shop class (or mechanical engineering) lessons that most need to be learned are the failures that aren't readily apparent. (Consider the Tacoma Narrows bridge, or the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse" rel="nofollow">Hyatt Regency walkway collapse</a>. I think that working with your hands gives a very valuable physicality to information concepts. Classes like 6.270 and 2.70 where you have to build devices in the physical world allow students to learn far more about the underlying concepts than pure textbook experiments. Since it happened, I've mourned the switch of 6.004 from discrete TTL logic devices, wired by hand, to FPGAs. Yes, the FPGAs are more like what students will be using in the real world, but I think being able to trace logic by hand in a physical embodiment provides for a much deeper level of understanding. Readily perceived failure isn’t the only value in working with your hands, and in fact the shop class (or mechanical engineering) lessons that most need to be learned are the failures that aren’t readily apparent. (Consider the Tacoma Narrows bridge, or the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. I think that working with your hands gives a very valuable physicality to information concepts. Classes like 6.270 and 2.70 where you have to build devices in the physical world allow students to learn far more about the underlying concepts than pure textbook experiments.

Since it happened, I’ve mourned the switch of 6.004 from discrete TTL logic devices, wired by hand, to FPGAs. Yes, the FPGAs are more like what students will be using in the real world, but I think being able to trace logic by hand in a physical embodiment provides for a much deeper level of understanding.

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