How to Teach the Sequential Part of Digital Electronics Basis with Project Pedagogy? Thanks to a Self-Working Card Trick Named “Cyclic Number”!

Abstract

Why use Magic for teaching digital electronics theory and software? Magicians know that, once the surprise has worn off, the audience will seek to understand how the trick works. The aim of every teacher is to interest their students, and a magic trick will lead them to ask how? And why? And how can I create one myself? Whatever the student's professional ambitions, they will be able to see the impact that originality and creativity have when combined with an interest in one's work. The students know how to “perform” a magic trick for their family and friends, a trick that they will be able to explain and so enjoy a certain amount of success. Sharing a mathematical / informatics demonstration not easy and that they do so means that they will have worked on understood and are capable of explaining this knowledge. Isn't this the aim of all teaching? In this article I present a self-working magic card trick, its global study and how, with a project pedagogy, digital electronics can be teached. I have presented, in a previous article in the same journal, all the notions of combinatory digital electronics. In this article I presented how to introduce the flip-flop gates, synchronous and asynchronous counters designed thanks to transition tables without using clear/reset entries of the gates. In order to visualize the results, seven segment displays with the associated encoders and decoders could be introduce and simulated by an open source software named “Logisim”. The truth table of each command circuits of the complete cycle can be calculated by Open Office.