The dice shown here is part of a set of 5 PCB's I developed in 2006 for a client. These haven't been tested yet so I am not sure if they will work as the client was intending to get pupils to trouble shoot them before a final version. They were created in 'Real PCB', a package I have used and up to now has been pretty similar to the other main educational PCB design package, 'PCB Wizard'.
I think I should express an interest in PCB 'Wizard' and its excellent successor, Circuit Wizard. I did some paid work for the company who makes the programs, but was hired after I was already using it with GCSE and KS3 pupils because of its excellence.
So why the dice picture? Firstly, I love to see how tiny I can make PCB's which are still usable / editable by pupils, and that are easily made as single sided boards. This one is about 45mm x 35mm if you stack the boards. With a little ingenuity, it should be possible to use a tiny 6 or 12v car alarm battery to power it and squeeze the whole onto the PICAXE PCB. I believe that with sample projects such as this that pupils learn on / with, it is important that you can see where the tracks go and understand how it works.
Secondly, It is part of a system where the base 8 pin PICAXE board acts as the starter for pupil projects, and they design the add-on bit. This may seem less satisfactory than designing the whole thing on one board, but as PICAXE 'headers' are part of all common PCB design packages, making it a discrete board seemed neater. It also means pupils are designing just the interface / outcome, not grappling with the whole board. Such an approach can give rise to track routing problems but there is no reason why connections on the pupil board could not be spaced around it rather than lined up in a row.
Thirdly, To tell you that there is a new version of Circuit Wizard due imminently. this will integrate together Circuit diagram, PCB layout and PICAXE programming into one interface. Then I will not have to wait for someone to test the idea above by building it. Instead it will be fully tested from within a single program. If it was available now, this article would be posted on my main website rather than here as a concept item!
I think that electronics has been the area of DT that has seen the biggest changes in the last 5 years. It is now extremely close to industrial methods of designing / testing and manufacturing one-off / prototype devices. Perhaps with the advent of such sophisticated technologies in schools, we should re-examine exactly which GCSE pupils should study. I was required to change to Product Design a few years ago from Electronics but still teach a mainly electronics based content. It wasn't a brilliant fit of subject and syllabus at the time, but it may prove ideal with such powerful software becoming mainstream.
