An Innovative Approach in Teaching Digital Electronics at Technical High Schools

This paper describes an innovative scenario in teaching digital electronics at technical high schools. The course designed to improve students’ applied logic ability, practical thinking, creative thinking, and critical thinking. The students work in teams in order to solve initially simple technical problems by using simulations and by comparing various circuits, and then more complex technical problems. The teacher guides the students through exploratory questions to discover new logic circuits by synthesizing simple logic circuits. Then, they are called to simplify them in order to make simpler circuits with the lowest cost. At the end of scenario, the students evaluate their own work and that of others. This paper makes several contributions to the fields of education of technicians on digital electronics, applied logic, critical and creative thinking. The teaching approach was applied in various technical high schools in Greece during the 2011-2012 schooling period with a great success.