Sparks & Circuits

Sparks & Circuits demystifies the invisible force behind nearly everything students touch. The journey starts inside the atom, where students discover why some materials carry charge and others refuse, watch static and current electricity behave by different rules, and then bend electricity to their will -- winding electromagnets, assembling a motor that actually spins, and generating current with nothing but motion and magnets.

The heart of the course is the workbench. Students learn to speak the schematic language of electronics, breadboard circuits component by component, and predict circuit behavior with Ohm's law before verifying every prediction with a multimeter. Simulation tools let them experiment fearlessly; systematic troubleshooting drills teach them to hunt faults like professionals. Capacitors and transistors then unlock timing, smoothing, switching, and amplification -- the building blocks of modern devices.

The course culminates in the digital frontier: binary numbers, logic gates, and truth tables, built up from the very transistors students already understand. Teams design an original logic circuit that solves a real decision problem, defend the trade-offs behind their design, and leave with a working artifact and a portfolio that points straight at careers in electrical and computer engineering.