VCE Systems Engineering Unit 1 — Electrotechnological systems design · Stage 6
Weeks 2-4 · How electrotechnology got here, and what it costs
Explain how one line of electrotechnological development unfolded, and weigh the impacts of a component choice.
Open this deck on the projector and press F for full-screen. N toggles speaker notes. The accompanying teacher guide is at /curriculum/vce-systems-engineering-unit-1/teacher/lessons/2.
Before this lesson:
Decide which development line you are teaching before the lesson. Depth in one beats a survey of five.
How electrotechnology got here, and what it costs
What you will be able to do
Explain how one line of electrotechnological development unfolded, and weigh the impacts of a component choice.
Decide which development line you are teaching before the lesson. Depth in one beats a survey of five.
What we're covering
Make the connection
Build a timeline for one line of development, annotated with what each step made possible.
Choose a single component from your kit and follow it from raw material to disposal.
Compare two components that do the same job across cost, energy, lifespan and what happens at end of life. Present the comparison as a table with your sources.
Write a short position on which you would specify and why, naming which impacts you weighted most heavily.
- Trace one line of development in depth rather than skimming several. The silicon chip works well: valve, transistor, integrated circuit, microcontroller — with the point being that each step made systems smaller, cheaper and more numerous. Telecommunications works equally well if your students prefer it.
- Land the consequence: the reason a student can afford to put a microcontroller in a school project at all is a hundred years of that development.
- Move to impacts. Take one component the students will actually use and follow it: where the materials come from, how it is made, how it is shipped, what happens when it is thrown away.
- Run a lifecycle comparison of two components that do the same job — an incandescent lamp against an LED, or aluminium against copper. Students collect the numbers rather than being given them.
- Draw out social, environmental and economic impacts as three separate lenses, and make students say which lens they are using when they make a claim.
- Connect it back to the brief: the system they build will itself have impacts, and those belong in their evaluation.
Quick check
Show your reasoning
I can compare two components across social, environmental and economic impacts, using numbers I found myself.
Students treat 'sustainable' as a property a component either has or does not. Push them to ask: compared to what, measured how, over what lifetime.
Before you pack up
Explain what you learned
Which impact did you weight most heavily in your recommendation, and would a different user weight it differently?
Annotated timeline; the lifecycle comparison table with sources; the written position.
End of lesson 2
Explain it. Apply it.
Next lesson: Components, symbols and circuits.