I kept this one relatively brief because I wasn't entirely sure what we should actually be making notes of here - personal observations versus recounted lecture elements and whatnot, mainly - but decided to consolidate the Throwie Lab and reading on electricity into a single Blog Debrief, considering the two made up two parts of a larger lecture / work day, anyway.
I read the Introduction and Chapter 1 to Physical Computing (Igoe, O'Sullivan) prior to the workday, but even then I was still fairly lost until we actually started laying things out in a more kinesthetic fashion during the lecture; I've always been more software-oriented than hardware, and thus I don't have a whole lot of background knowledge regarding the actual elements behind physical computing. The most hands-on electrical work I've done was custom-building a PC and assembling it with my dad, and even then with how many tutorials you can find online the line between actual synthesis of the inner workings and just going through the instructions is pretty blurry. That being said, the lecture did actually make things click for me a lot more easily.
For some prior projects and assignments I had done some research skirting the line of the actual mechanics behind electricity, though ironically I had a better understanding of even more microscopic forces (esp. fundamental / elementary forces) than electricity before the lecture. That being said, it was all pretty straightforward when we actually got some examples / analogies as to why electrical components operate the way they do rather than just explicit, 1:1 definitions the way the book primarily laid things out. Positive charges naturally attempting to occupy negative charges makes complete sense - I don't know why I hadn't actually thought about it before - but the entire lecture kind of blew my mind, honestly. It lines up with the laws of thermodynamics, and thinking about it pretty much all of the fundamental interactions work in a similar fashion transferring positive energy into negative energy.
In terms of hands-on material (the Throwie lab), I think it was a good transition into actual "electrical work," if you can even call it that. The Throwies were exemplary of the concept(s) of electrical charge, positive and negative interactions, etc. with a little bit of of the to-be-expected Asmuth post-anarchist ideology thrown in.
I neglected to take any pictures for this Blog Debriefing, but I'll be sure to get some for the next one.
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