Turning Ben Eater's 8 Bit Computer Into A Class

And... The Great Experiment Begins... Turning Ben Eater's 8 Bit Computer into a class... This year I and my now friend, Randy, had my students start building Ben Eater's 8 Bit Computer. I teach a high school Mechatronics Engineering class to 11 and 12 grade students here in San Jose CA.  It's a super cool public Career Technical Education (CTE) school where I get the students for 3 hours every day... So we can really dig into stuff

It was kinda a quick, "Why Not", teaching experiment, to teach digital logic this year.  I had a short set of lesson plans for digital logic, but building this 8 bit computer is really a great way to teach many deep digital logic concepts.... so when my superintendent said, "Hey, I have some grant money left, could you come up with a project to spend it on?"... I said yes.  We used the grant $$ to buy some "Build an 8 bit computer from scratch" kits... I'm building the lessons and curriculum for free... ha ha... welcome to teaching...

So next year (2019-2020) I'm going to build a high school semester worth of lesson plans.  My plan is to build a unit of 50 - 60 hours of curriculum and lesson plans. This will be about 1/3 - 1/2 of my 2nd semester curriculum... If you teach 1 hours a day, this might be 50% or more of you semester...

As soon as school ends this year (May 24... WooHooo), I'm going to start to build a complete kit, and document all the points where students will need background and supplementary material.  I'll also create more support lessons and labs to fill in the gaps students with little or no electronics will have... like "What's and LED" and "How does a bread board work?"

My goal is to create supplemental material that will support Ben Eater's already AWESOME project videos... It's great stuff, but it's meant for a Hobbyist... and that is way different than a high school or college student in a class room setting.

Randy and I have started putting together some tips and tricks to teach this... and plan to continue this over the summer, to be ready to teach this again next year.  I plan on teaching this starting Jan 2020, so we have some time to tune it.

My additional plan is to make this all Open Source and distributed under a creative commons license...  More about my philosophy on Open Source later...

Do you want to teach Ben Eater's 8 Bit Computer project too?  DO YOU WANT TO HELP?  Come Joint the project... It will be an AWESOME ride, and I think if we get a few of us teachers poking at this, it will be great.

OK.. Here we go... I have 3 weeks of school left... Between now and then, I'll get a google site setup, and maybe a google class room.  I'll post the links and start letting you know what I'm doing... and how you can help.  To Join the project or find out more drop me an email at TopClown@STEAMClown.org

Keep Learning... Keep Pushing... I want to live on Mars some day... Invent or build something to help us get there...