Understanding the Wheatstone Bridge
The main purpose of this website is to provide an explanation of the Wheatstone Bridge in a clear and concise way to help first year engineering students grasp the principles involved in analysing a Wheatstone Bridge and look at practical applications.
After learning the basic theory, there is a useful tab with problems to enable the students to practice questions and highlight any misconceptions and re-enforce their knowledge gained.
After learning the basic theory, there is a useful tab with problems to enable the students to practice questions and highlight any misconceptions and re-enforce their knowledge gained.
HistoryThe Wheatstone Bridge was first founded by Samuel Hunter Christie in the year 1833. However, at that time the inventor couldn’t make out the real use of it. Several years later, Sir Charles Wheatstone identified the various applications of the device and showed its importance to people. It was after he usefully described the device that it was named the Wheatstone Bridge.
He also developed the Wheatstone wave machine which is a moving mechanical model for demonstrating wave properties of light and sound. It displayed both vertical and horizontal waves with varying differences of phase. This is nicely demonstrated in the YouTube clip attached. |
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My Website creation review
This is aimed at first year engineering students on an introductory course in electrical principles. I found Weebly, the website creation tool, very straightforward to use and initially very enjoyable. It was great for putting together a quite professional looking website very quickly which was encouraging. However, as I tried to fine tune things, it became somewhat frustrating. As I added an image, other text boxes would move around or change text size and the worst thing is there was no ‘undo’ button. I found it best to keep images and text separate. I liked the way links to the web or YouTube could be easily inserted into the pages. I also learned how to create sub-pages under a page tab, such as the Wheatstone Bridge tab and then I created two other pages under that tab called balanced bridge and unbalanced bridge.
However, I had intended to include a tab with a page of multiple choice questions (MCQs) but found I was unable to do that as there was no mechanism to receive input from the user, in this free version of Weebly anyway, so I had to compromise and just put questions on the webpage and then links to the solutions. I put in links to both screencast solutions which I made and also to plain text solutions, in case any user would have technical problems opening the video files. I spent a lot of time trying to size up all the fonts consistently on each page and drawing all the circuit diagrams, which I did in Paint and PowerPoint and then saved as images to import into the web page. I have found this exercise very interesting and rewarding. I would have been daunted at the prospect of producing webpages before I did this exercise and I am delighted at the results I was able to achieve despite being a total novice. I can definitely see myself utilising technology such as webpages and screencasts much more in the future and will include them in the Blackboard resources I make available to my students. |
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