4 ms·

Actually-educational things for kids haven't gone away entirely, though they've certainly changed shape. There are a lot of kids and teenager related products a

Actually-educational things for kids haven't gone away entirely, though they've certainly changed shape. There are a lot of kids and teenager related products around programming and microcontroller-related hobby projects that teach and require deeper understanding of the concepts. Building a radio, on the other hand, when AM/FM radio is now 90-100 years old instead of 20-30... that wouldn't interest me nearly as much anyway. At the extreme end of "kids today" (ok, ten years ago), you have Palmer Luckey building VR headsets. Does anyone have figures on what percentage of 1950s kids were using those sophisticated chemistry or radio kits?

melony 4y ago
The mathematics of radios are a lot more difficult than the basic boolean logic and discrete math for intro to programming. Radios and circuits are in differential equations territory. A thorough explanation of the RF concept of "ground" and transmission lines is impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details.
- majormajor 4y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. My father had a hobbyist radio kit in his youth, but he didn't understand all the details then. He later learned diffeq in college. It was and still is quite easy to build many already-discovered things without understanding them.
  - wrp 4y ago
    You are thinking of assembling pre-made kits. The math is for designing circuits from scratch.
- wrp 4y ago
  > [things]...impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details. Something about my dad's generation is that I observed them to be more ready to resort to workbench tinkering to get over patches where their math gave out. Following your point, maybe this results from their early experiences of aiming beyond their math capabilities.
- QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
  I may be showing my filter bubble, but what fraction of highschoolers get to first order systems of linear differential equations? We heavily covered them in BC calc but I guess I don't know if that's the curriculum or my teacher going the extra mile
  - jerf 4y ago
    I covered them in high school, but in isolation. I think it'd have to be a dedicated high school program explicitly built to cover differential equations and tie them back to physics and then also get far enough into EM for that to be the way you can teach about radios. Not even remotely all high school students could handle that and I think even in an accelerated program you'd have to consciously be sacrificing something else to get there, e.g., organic chemistry or something. There's only so much time. I mean, even in college, the physics I took that did EM with full, undiluted multivariable calculus was considered the accelerated/advanced track. "Normal" EM worked with a lot less math. I'm sure the 1950s kids were indeed learning handwaving approximations. That's not a criticism. You can get a long way on good handwaving approximations.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  RLC circuits and the associated differential equations definitely were part of the high-school curriculum when I was there fifteen years ago. That’s 90% of what you need for an intro to RF concept. My understanding is that the US doesn’t require a lot of maths in high school which might explain why people view this later there.
wrp 4y ago
Something to help appreciate the relation of science to youth culture in the 1950s is the popularity of sci-fi movies. Aside from rare exceptions like Destination Moon (1950), 1950s sci-fi was produced with no pedagogic intent. Studios churned out these movies because science (okay, sci-fi) was what attracted the teen market. In the 1960s, teen tastes shifted to horror and the film studios followed. If you are interested in 1950s American sci-fi cinema, the comprehensive survey is Bill Warren's Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2016).
kragen 4y ago
aside from the question of novelty, i think i can buy a pocket am/fm radio for us$6 today https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-portatil-ditron-am-fm-parlante-bolsillo-vintage-antena-_JM https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-por... so building a radio from scratch doesn't have the same cachet it had in the 01950s when a radio was a major household appliance people would save up for you can definitely kit-build an am or fm radio from a kit without any understanding of the concepts, the radioshack '200-in-1' 'science fair' kit had wiring netlists for both am and fm radios, and didn't really explain the concepts. similarly you can solder together a microcontroller board and write circuitpython on it without any understanding of the concepts in any of these cases there are a shitload of concepts to learn i don't know much about chemistry but i think you have measurement error, valence electrons, vacuum filtration, density, oxidation states, precipitation, ph, solubility, activity, decantation, density, enthalpy, recrystallization, pressure, solubility product, never give an acid a drink, entropy, flasks bubbling over, gibbs free energy, hplc, equilibrium, distillation, the arrhenius law, sublimation, ligands, spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, ... in analog electronics you have measurement error, voltage, current, energy, capacitance, resistance, complex impedance, inductance, frequency, power, charge, parasitics, exponential decay, diffeqs, linear time-invariant systems, lti system transfer functions, convolution, the fourier transform, filtering, and only then do you get into nonlinear systems: rectification, inductive kick, transistor action, transistor switches, the ebers-moll model, miller capacitance, schmitt triggers, oscillators, etc. iirc that's just the first two chapters of horowitz and hill and there are thirteen more chapters and sixteen appendices. to be fair some of them are digital in programming you have the whole programming iceberg at https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/ https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/. but even if you only get into the stuff that is actually involved in blinking an led on an esp32 as a microcontroller-related hobby project you have c, a compiler, a parser, context-free grammars, finite state machines, variables, lvalues vs. rvalues, subroutines, formal vs. actual parameters, arrays, hash tables, linked lists, pattern matching, optimizing transformations, denotational semantics, undefined behavior, structs, rtl, assembly language, machine code, symbol tables, linkers, register machines, propositional logic, de morgan's theorem, synchronous logic, metastable flip-flop states when crossing clock domains, jtag, debuggers, ram, flash, tcp/ip (tcp ip arp routing checksums ethernet), wi-fi, direct-sequence spread-spectrum communication, ofdm, shannon's theorem, csma/ca vs. csma/cd, pwm, etc there's a shitload to learn but you can do stuff without knowing more than a tiny amount of it

melony 4y ago

The mathematics of radios are a lot more difficult than the basic boolean logic and discrete math for intro to programming. Radios and circuits are in differential equations territory. A thorough explanation of the RF concept of "ground" and transmission lines is impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details.

majormajor 4y ago
I'm not sure I follow. My father had a hobbyist radio kit in his youth, but he didn't understand all the details then. He later learned diffeq in college. It was and still is quite easy to build many already-discovered things without understanding them.
- wrp 4y ago
  You are thinking of assembling pre-made kits. The math is for designing circuits from scratch.
wrp 4y ago
> [things]...impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details. Something about my dad's generation is that I observed them to be more ready to resort to workbench tinkering to get over patches where their math gave out. Following your point, maybe this results from their early experiences of aiming beyond their math capabilities.
QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
I may be showing my filter bubble, but what fraction of highschoolers get to first order systems of linear differential equations? We heavily covered them in BC calc but I guess I don't know if that's the curriculum or my teacher going the extra mile
- jerf 4y ago
  I covered them in high school, but in isolation. I think it'd have to be a dedicated high school program explicitly built to cover differential equations and tie them back to physics and then also get far enough into EM for that to be the way you can teach about radios. Not even remotely all high school students could handle that and I think even in an accelerated program you'd have to consciously be sacrificing something else to get there, e.g., organic chemistry or something. There's only so much time. I mean, even in college, the physics I took that did EM with full, undiluted multivariable calculus was considered the accelerated/advanced track. "Normal" EM worked with a lot less math. I'm sure the 1950s kids were indeed learning handwaving approximations. That's not a criticism. You can get a long way on good handwaving approximations.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
RLC circuits and the associated differential equations definitely were part of the high-school curriculum when I was there fifteen years ago. That’s 90% of what you need for an intro to RF concept. My understanding is that the US doesn’t require a lot of maths in high school which might explain why people view this later there.

wrp 4y ago

Something to help appreciate the relation of science to youth culture in the 1950s is the popularity of sci-fi movies. Aside from rare exceptions like Destination Moon (1950), 1950s sci-fi was produced with no pedagogic intent. Studios churned out these movies because science (okay, sci-fi) was what attracted the teen market. In the 1960s, teen tastes shifted to horror and the film studios followed. If you are interested in 1950s American sci-fi cinema, the comprehensive survey is Bill Warren's Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2016).

kragen 4y ago

aside from the question of novelty, i think i can buy a pocket am/fm radio for us$6 today https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-portatil-ditron-am-fm-parlante-bolsillo-vintage-antena-_JM https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-por... so building a radio from scratch doesn't have the same cachet it had in the 01950s when a radio was a major household appliance people would save up for you can definitely kit-build an am or fm radio from a kit without any understanding of the concepts, the radioshack '200-in-1' 'science fair' kit had wiring netlists for both am and fm radios, and didn't really explain the concepts. similarly you can solder together a microcontroller board and write circuitpython on it without any understanding of the concepts in any of these cases there are a shitload of concepts to learn i don't know much about chemistry but i think you have measurement error, valence electrons, vacuum filtration, density, oxidation states, precipitation, ph, solubility, activity, decantation, density, enthalpy, recrystallization, pressure, solubility product, never give an acid a drink, entropy, flasks bubbling over, gibbs free energy, hplc, equilibrium, distillation, the arrhenius law, sublimation, ligands, spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, ... in analog electronics you have measurement error, voltage, current, energy, capacitance, resistance, complex impedance, inductance, frequency, power, charge, parasitics, exponential decay, diffeqs, linear time-invariant systems, lti system transfer functions, convolution, the fourier transform, filtering, and only then do you get into nonlinear systems: rectification, inductive kick, transistor action, transistor switches, the ebers-moll model, miller capacitance, schmitt triggers, oscillators, etc. iirc that's just the first two chapters of horowitz and hill and there are thirteen more chapters and sixteen appendices. to be fair some of them are digital in programming you have the whole programming iceberg at https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/ https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/. but even if you only get into the stuff that is actually involved in blinking an led on an esp32 as a microcontroller-related hobby project you have c, a compiler, a parser, context-free grammars, finite state machines, variables, lvalues vs. rvalues, subroutines, formal vs. actual parameters, arrays, hash tables, linked lists, pattern matching, optimizing transformations, denotational semantics, undefined behavior, structs, rtl, assembly language, machine code, symbol tables, linkers, register machines, propositional logic, de morgan's theorem, synchronous logic, metastable flip-flop states when crossing clock domains, jtag, debuggers, ram, flash, tcp/ip (tcp ip arp routing checksums ethernet), wi-fi, direct-sequence spread-spectrum communication, ofdm, shannon's theorem, csma/ca vs. csma/cd, pwm, etc there's a shitload to learn but you can do stuff without knowing more than a tiny amount of it