Bout 3-4 years back I had a PLTW (project lead the way) Digital electronics course in my junior year of HS. It was really fun! My class mates were always cracking wise and jokeing around. Our teacher was a hard ass, but put up with and even joked along with the class. I remember supriseing him good when after having missed two of the three classes in which we were suposed to finish building the kit (this kit would be needed for all future projects) I built nearly the whole thing in one class and took only a few minutes in the after school session (which was to get the slower kids caught up). The guy was totally suprised that I knew how to solder that kit together so fast. I learned a bunch of interesting things about digital circuits (most of what we learned was AOI logic and counter/timer circuits using 74 series logic).
I really got alot out of that class. In fact not long before started we useing flip-flops and timers alot of the kids were wanting to make the 7-segment display count, and I went ahead and built this Rube Glodbergien AOI logic monstrousity that could actually count to about 8 (because the damn thing used so many chips it would overload the power supply if I added the circuits to count higher!
). The teacher took one look at the hand drawn schematic and said "I'm not going to even try to understand how it works", and he used to work on this stuff for a living!
Sorry to go off topic. The recient posts just reminded me of that time and got me all nostalgic.
Tom C.