Unschooling Share (Strew?) Everything: LEDs, transistors, and Morse Code, Oh My

Sharing everything I do with the 11, 10, and 7 year-old gang works best for me in unschooling. Of course, YMMV. Allow me to elucidate.

This morning, I decided that Forrest Cook was exactly right. The diode that was protecting the Rockmite from dying if I ever hooked up the batteries backward was also succking up 0.8 Volts that could be used to transmit a bit further. I decided to take the thing out.

But first, I called the gang in to talk about it. They've worked with LEDs before; they know that if you hook them up backwards they don't conduct, and therefore don't light up.I explained that this was exactly the same, except the here diode doesn't light up ever. It does however flat out refuse to conduct if the battery is hooked up backwards, (the same thing as the LED being instralled backwards.) I then explained that not conducting when the batterey was backwards kept other bits of the circuit from dying when hooked up to a backwards battery. Finally, I talked about how I'd have a prodcedure in place to check the battery polarity ever time I changed batteries by using a voltmeter. The whol thing took maybe five minutes.

At this point, the 7 and 9 year-old kids, Tawnse and Mota (for our purposes) left. The 11 year-old, Daize, stayed. I lost my glasses several months back. My vision is going all to hell. The kid asked if she could help with the de-soldering. (That's the diode at the end of the brown power supply wire there.)

I gladly accepted her offer of help, and off we went. She torqued the living bejesus out of the power supply plug at one point, we talked about only moving things when you need to. I dediced to go with a different type of wire thanks to seeing what the difficulties were even if you could see. The kid got practice soldering. It was good all around. We, after a lot of work involving trying to get better solder joints

wound up here:

Which, frankly, wasn't great, but we could mess around all day trying to get a better solder joint and potentially burn the pad off the board, orrrrrr we could leave good enough alone. We left good enough alone for now.

And! Well, the radio still works! Is it better? I don't know yet. I'll measure the output wave the next time I'm at our maker space. Here's the pre-diode-removal wave for reference:

It should be at least 0.8 V larger now. We'll see. But, the kid's getting interested in ham radio!

But wait! There's more! There's steak knives! (OK, there's not actually steak knives.)

This afternoon, when trying to reach other stations, the 11 year-old asked how the radio was working. I asked if she wanted to listen in. She did. She could hear a station I couldn't! Cool!!!

Also!? The seven year-old cruised by. Her interest was piqued. She asked to listen in while I called CQ. I called out the letters as I transmitted. She practiced Morse code (they're all learning the code.) We had fun!

What would have happened if no one was interested? That would have been fine too. This is so much fun!

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

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Copasetic Flow

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