Suggestions

Thread Starter

steeve_wai

Joined Sep 13, 2007
47
PLEASE INCLUDE A SECTION OF SOLVED PROBLEMS (BOTH DRILL AND CONCEPTUAL TYPE) WITH EVERY LESSON IN THE E BOOK.ALSO TRY TO START A FORUM/PAGE THAT DISCUSSES SOLVED PROBLEMS ONLY.the e books are excellent but i feel that THEORY IS USELESS WITHOUT PROBLEM SOLVING AND THAT ONLY PROBLEMS HELP US TO UNDERSTAND THEORY BETTER.
 

Dcrunkilton

Joined Jul 31, 2004
422
steeve_wal,

Excellent suggestion. Most text books have homework problems at the end of the chapter. And, they include a few worked problems scattered throughout the text section. The big-time text book publishers often provide an instructors' solutions manual to the homwork problems--hand written solutions. My biggest gripe when I was a student was the dearth of solved problems in the text.

Solutions:

I once took a math course where the text was a Schaums Collece Outline Series "Differential Equations", which was mostly solved problems-- a student's delight. This may have been the only course where there was an adequate number of solved problems. This is the quickest solution if you can find a Schaums matching your needs.

Tony Kuphaldt believes that students learn best by working on an assignment of questions. That is one reason (amoung others) he is no longer associated with "Lessons in Electricity". He has moved on to the Socratic Electronics Project at:

www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/

There he provides the homework questions that nornally appear at the end of the text chapters. Though, his assignments are not directly keyed to any volumes or chapters in this text. Tony also provides the solutions. His feeling about the text a few years ago when he was still associated with it, was that the printed PDF version of some volumes was getting too long at over 500 pages. He felt that the homework questions needed to be a seperate volume--- a set of homework handouts. If I were providing homework questions, they would be in the form of handouts, distinct from the text. That will have to wait pending completion of the text of the volumes.

As for worked problems within the text:

Tony has done a really good job in the DC volume of providing solved problems within the text. His solutions are unusually well organized for a textbook. Look for his tabularized solutions which look something like a miniature spreadsheet: See http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_5/2.html for "Simple series circuits".
Some more examples:
Simple parallel circuits http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_5/3.html
Series-Parallel Combination Circuits http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_7/2.html
DC network analysis http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_10/index.html
I particularly reccommend the DC netowork analysis chapter if you are looking for math problems. At the suggestion of Davy Van Nieuwenborgh, we even show how to do some of the solutions with Octave, an opensource Matlab clone.
Attenuators:http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_3/chpt_1/7.html in Volmue 3 has some solved problems

The Digital volume 4, "Karnaugh mapping" chapter http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_4/chpt_8/index.html
and the Digital "Shift resisters" chapter http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_4/chpt_12/index.html have solved problems included within the text.

With math problems one needs to be careful to not exceed the intended scope of this text. I believe that this text is meant to be a source of easy to comprehend descriptive material. With an example like the "Scott-T transformer" derivation at http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_2/chpt_9/7.html

we may have exceeded that scope. In other words, we don't want too much math to obscure the basic concepts as in the above example.

I will try to include some solved DC bias examples in the "Bipolar junction transistors" of Semiconductors Volume 3, which is being completed.
 

Dave

Joined Nov 17, 2003
6,969
I would like to see the Socratic project coming along side the e-book here at AAC, and I will endeavour to look further into this (some work has been done by Rob on porting it over).

If we can bring the e-book and Socratic project together so that people have a reference resource and questions to support this resource then this is a start. From there we could look at providing a dedicated forum for supporting the e-book/questions. At the moment I am unsure about the cohesion between the e-book and Socratic project questions (perhaps Dennis could advise) and therefore we must not try to run before we can walk.

Its an interesting area for development here at AAC. Comments are welcome.

Dave
 

Dcrunkilton

Joined Jul 31, 2004
422
There is not much cohesion between the E-book and the Socratic project. By that I mean that "worksheets" are not keyed to the chapters of the E-Book. It was not a goal of the project to support the E-book.

Developing cohesion between the E-Book and the Socratic project would involve reading all the Socratic worksheets and organizing them into "Chapters" corresponding to the E-book. This would be analogous to putting the approipriate woksheets at the end of the various chapters. The online version could actually have the worksheets at the end of the chapters. You can do just about anything online. For the printed version I would put them in a seperate work book. (Experiments volume looks a lot like a workbook)

While the Socratic worksheets are valuable by themsleves, they would be of the most value to allaboutelectronics users if there was cohesion. Developing that cohesion is a worthy goal. And, I have gotten request for chapter questions before. There is interest .

If you can merge the Socratic worksheets with the E-book, as opposed to hosting is alongside, you will have something unique, worth more than the sum of the parts.


Potential problems:

1. The worksheets are in PDF, not a dual html pdf distribution-- as far as I know. I am not clear if there is an actual source analogous to the .sml E-book source files. Something you might want to look into. There may be a way to convert PDF directly to HTML. (I was able to convert "Opeartional amplifier input to output phase shift" PDF to ACSII, then manually to .sml)
2. There may be questions in the worksheets that cannot be answered on the basis of the E-book text. (Socratic is a seperate project)

3. There may be worksheets that don't fit any chapters.

4. It has been a while since I looked at any of the worksheets. It seems like they were like lab handouts with space for answering questions, not sure, something like I would do for homework assignemnts. Is the format compatible with the web way of presentation? Would you need to reformat for a webpage? Take a close look as some of the worksheets.
 

Dave

Joined Nov 17, 2003
6,969
Thank you Dennis for the comments, I will provide answers to the problems below.

1. The worksheets are in PDF, not a dual html pdf distribution-- as far as I know. I am not clear if there is an actual source analogous to the .sml E-book source files. Something you might want to look into. There may be a way to convert PDF directly to HTML. (I was able to convert "Opeartional amplifier input to output phase shift" PDF to ACSII, then manually to .sml)
I know Rob did dome conversion on this side of things, but the task was quite substantial - I will ask his to provide his input at this point.

2. There may be questions in the worksheets that cannot be answered on the basis of the E-book text. (Socratic is a seperate project)
This is understandable, however I feel it is worth looking at fitting the e-book and the Socratic project as best we can, then looking and matching cohesion between the two - work with what we have first, even if that means eliminating some sections.

3. There may be worksheets that don't fit any chapters.
An issue in itself. We could either 'best-fit' the worksheets, else wait till we have a section that warrants their inclusion. The Socratic project does not have to be a 100% integration.

4. It has been a while since I looked at any of the worksheets. It seems like they were like lab handouts with space for answering questions, not sure, something like I would do for homework assignemnts. Is the format compatible with the web way of presentation? Would you need to reformat for a webpage? Take a close look as some of the worksheets.
Again I will ask Rob for his comments here, he is best to advise on this matter.

Dave
 
Top