A Short History of My Web Work

I wrote this personal story in 2001 when I began creating with a great enthusiasm the site of circuit-fantasia.com (How do we understand, present and invent electronic circuits).

Feeling Dissatisfaction 

If I have to describe myself as a teacher I don’t think the word "ordinary" would apply. That is so because I do not accept the traditional abstract approach favored in technical education: formal analysis of ready-made circuit solutions. As far back as I can remember -- as a pupil, an undergraduate and a beginning teacher -- I was trying with no success to penetrate into popular electronic circuit operation using classical textbooks on electronics. With time I have reached the conclusion that formal methods do not explain circuits. The mathematical models they use cannot reveal the basic ideas circuits are grounded on: these models hide structure, causality and structure-function relations. Formal methods may lead us to absurdity analyzing something, not really knowing what it is.

Creating a Philosophy

I have never wanted to think in a formal way: I am a human being, not a computer. In order to grasp how abstract electronic circuits work, I try to discern familiar simpler devices in complicated mixtures of electronic devices and well-known ideas and principles drawn from our everyday experience. I believe electronic devices, no matter how complicated, are based on clear and simple basic concepts. To reveal them, I have to find out how these devices were invented.

Therefore, I begin by breaking circuits up into their building blocks and, about each block, I ask myself questions such as: "What is it really like? What does it do? What is its role in this circuit? Where else have I met something of the kind? Above all, I’m interested in how particular devices perform in a general way rather than how they are arranged. To reveal the circuit performance, I look for everyday situations in which a human being has a similar behavior. Then I place myself mentally or even actually in their place. For example, I replace real transistors and op-amps with “manual” ones and begin performing their functions (these are my favorite experiments for my students in the laboratory). Thus I get a taste of what the device “feels” and a picture of its behavior revealing cause and effect relations in its operation. I do that mostly using my imagination rather than my reasoning, visualizing in my mind’s eye how potentials rise and drop, currents flow from high to low potential point, resistors "shorten" and "lengthen", etc.

In this way, moving back slowly, I restore step by step the evolution of electronic circuits. Next, I present circuits in their logical succession: building and inventing rather than analyzing them as ready-made circuit solutions. As an example, in another post, I told the story of how I revealed the secret of op-amp inverting circuits with negative feedback, which I take great pride in.

Building a Heuristic Course

Revealing the fundamental ideas behind electronic circuits has become my favorite pursuit. By doing so for a few years I have managed to build my own course as an alternative to the classical course in Analog Electronics. In my course I do not present electronic devices as ready-made circuit solutions to be analyzed in their complete, final and perfect form. Instead, I build circuits step-by-step using more elementary building blocks connected in the conformity with basic ideas derived from real life. I do this “inventing” together with the students in laboratory relying mainly on their intuition and imagination rather than their logical reasoning. 

The content of the site is presented in three logically connected parts. In the first one, most elementary passive analog devices are “invented”, each successive circuit based on some previous simpler devices. In the second part classical transistor circuits without negative feedback and with imperfect one are built. In the final part imperfect passive and transistor circuits are "re-embodied" in ideal ones using the negative feedback phenomenon in its variety of manifestations. 

I have used and continuously improved this heuristic course for over ten years in laboratory exercises and seminars in Analog Electronics at the Technical university, Sofia. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s I experimented a similar course with students from the Vocational College of Communications in Sofia; some of them are now students at the Technical University, and the best one has since been helping me in my undertaking. 

Both the undergraduates and the pupils enthusiastically accepted the approach, and that stimulated me to popularize it. 

Seeking Popularity

COLLEAGUES. First, I decided to share my philosophy with colleagues presenting a few methodological papers at two conferences in this country. Contrary to my expectations, they did not appreciate my approach. 

PROFESSIONALS. Failing to find followers among colleagues, I decided to publish parts of the heuristic course as a series of articles in the professional magazine Engineering Review. In the column Looking for an Idea I began revealing systematically the fundamental ideas behind the most popular analog electronic circuits. But the readers showed no interest so I stopped contributing. 

SCIENTISTS. From then I decided to look for popularity abroad. I prepared a series of three large articles concerning some of my powerful ideas for IEEE on Education (I had joined IEEE a few years previously). I had put in a lot of effort to prepare the proposal but then I realized the subject-matter of the magazine did not precisely correspond to its name. Probably that was not the right choice of a magazine so I gave it up.

HOBBYISTS. Meanwhile, I arrived at the conclusion to present the heuristic approach in action solving concrete practical problems: not only analyzing electronic circuits but synthesizing, “inventing” them. Accordingly, I began preparing a new series of articles How to Invent Electronic Circuits, which I intended proposing to some amateur magazines like Popular Electronics. However, I soon realized they were mostly intended for “doers” rather than “thinkers” and temporarily put this project off. 

THE BOOK. By that time I had collected a good many principles revealing common ideas behind seemingly different electronic devices. Then two new ideas occurred to me: first, to begin building collections of principles and circuits; second, to incorporate three reasoning activities -- understanding, presenting and inventing -- into one whole. This logically grew into an intention of publishing a book How to Understand, Present and Invent Electronic Circuits. Only, I soon realized how limited the potentialities of typography are to present color and movement (my pictures were multicolored and movable). What is more, I wanted to create a well-structured and open system which might be continually enlarged.

Making my Work More Attractive. 

THE MULTIMEDIA. As a consequence, a new idea ripened -- to implement all that in electronic form (as a web site). Thanks to my assistant I got to know the wonderful features of Flash Animator, designed by Macromedia for the creation of interactive animated web pages. I gave up the traditional print form and started to implement my ideas as an interactive multimedia product: How to Understand, Present and Invent Electronic Circuits.