I did an electronics course whereby we started with transistors, and designed some gates.
Once that worked, we then took some gates, and designed and built some simple building blocks such as flip-flops, up to adder circuitry.
Once we could do that sort of thing, we had a board with an 8080 on it, and had to write very small programs for it in binary (Input was via 8 switches, and a load to memory location button and output was a set of LEDs. )
It was fun and interesting, but by the end of all this we still had not done that much from an application point of view. Unless you were actively interested in electronics, then this exercise would have been quite excruciatingly boring.
I would have thought that starting at a high level, doing something that seemed fun, or at least useful, and working down as appropriate, would be generally better for keeping less geeky minds interested.
We differ here: you are starting at the most primitive hadware level - transistors and gates - and I am starting at the most basic level of logic, the Turing machine.
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Once that worked, we then took some gates, and designed and built some simple building blocks such as flip-flops, up to adder circuitry.
Once we could do that sort of thing, we had a board with an 8080 on it, and had to write very small programs for it in binary (Input was via 8 switches, and a load to memory location button and output was a set of LEDs. )
It was fun and interesting, but by the end of all this we still had not done that much from an application point of view. Unless you were actively interested in electronics, then this exercise would have been quite excruciatingly boring.
I would have thought that starting at a high level, doing something that seemed fun, or at least useful, and working down as appropriate, would be generally better for keeping less geeky minds interested.