Celebrating Student's Work
- Lenny McCoy
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
At SGE we build Self Confidence, self belief and digital skills through the application of theory into practice. This is happening on a daily basis with break through events occurring all the time that increase engagement, drive positivity and results in a journey that takes our students down a digital pathway that is designed to direct them towards a future career goal.
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I wanted to share an example of such as project, a student who had very little previous experience in electronics built an incredible tool that will help us and other students. We have a lot of old retro hardware that our students use, repair and discuss as part of their course here. When the hardware goes wrong, it is hard to fault find to determine there are any faulty chips.
We decided to build a Retro Chip Tester to use as part of our tools here at SGE and gave that project to one student to manage. Our input was minimal - we purchased a bare circuit board from Retro Lemon which is the uk distributor for the Retro Chip Tester Pro. and beyond that we did very little else other than a bit of oversight.
The student was given a ton of documents that describe the design, how to build it, what components (and alternatives) are required and how it is used. From there they figured out what was needed and submitted an order for parts for approval. They read each datasheet and instruction set and set out to build the board by assembling and soldering components.
Just to give you some idea of how hard that was take a look at one of the MOSFETs on my finger in the image which measures just 2mm wide with solder points that are a fraction of that.
Despite very limited experience in soldering, the student persevered through a large number of challenges, figured out ways of resolving them, determined the best way and asked some questions where there were roadblocks preventing progress. The vast majority of my time was to ask how progress was going and to offer some advice on technique. That was it.. the rest was self generated and a few days later, the device was powered up and worked first time. This is an incredible demonstration of self determination, analysis, tenacity, problem solving and learning new skills.
Whilst this task was to build a circuit and those skills have been aquired.. the real benefits are transferable to any form of industry going forwards and will now form part of their portfolio of evidence that they can present to a future employer. Industries such as engineering, IT support and cyber security require these skills.
We are so proud of what our students achieve and they should also be very proud of their achievements. Sometimes it is hard for them to accept success based on prior experience.
Complex tasks that they percieve to be beyond their skills, if broken down into small steps, are very much within their grasp and entirely possible with a bit of support.
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