Design of an Educational Oscilloscope: A hands-on learning tool

Paradoxically, most engineering students do not possess an in-depth knowledge on how an oscilloscope works. Automation is partly to be blamed for this problem. In fact, the existence of the “auto scale” button has eliminated the hassle of making adjustments, but at the price of dampening the students´ curiosity and removing their need for deep understanding. We have found a powerful way of stimulating students´ curiosity and of bestowing them with knowledge of the basic oscilloscope operation: While still using an oscilloscope-set, although merely as a display unit, we have by-passed its fundamental components (namely the vertical amplifier, the time base and the trigger circuit), with our own designed components, built outside of the oscilloscope-set. Our teaching strategy provides students with hands-on experimentation of the circuits that control vertical gain, the time scale and the trigger level. Our educational tool is implemented in hardware; it is not another simulation oscilloscope. The effects of our didactic tool are highly positive, as demonstrated by student evaluation of circuit laboratories that took place before and after we incorporated the Educational Oscilloscope into the engineering curriculum. This paper provides the reader with the following educational facilities: the Educational Oscilloscope circuit schematics, as well as the explanation of its several components as provided to the engineering students at SUNY New Paltz.