Silicon, Circuits and the Digital Revolution

This Honors colloquium introduces first-year students to some of the science behind high technology. Designed to promote scientific and computer literacy and awareness, it gives students an opportunity to leverage their interests in everyday devices and high-tech objects into a study of fundamental science concepts. Live demonstrations, in-class group explorations of technology applications, and daily work with the Internet are essential elements of this course. A key feature of the writing-intensive work for this colloquium will be the students' setup and development of a personal website. Working in small groups, students will also be creating websites devoted to a science and technology topic. This site provides the details of 33 class activities in this course that include measuring the resistivity of Playdoh, electronic band structure and digital logic. There are some good ideas here for class activities using problem based learning.