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We talk about context and learning with Chris Gammell, founder of the Contextual Electronics series of instructional videos.

• Adam’s favorite lab course in school was Bituminous Materials, which investigated the properties and characteristics of asphalt.
• Our guest, Chris Gammell, recently tweeted about Christmas Ale from the Great Lakes Brewing Company, and we inquire about his affection for this particular beer.
• Chris took a few photos inside the brewery during a recent tour:
  
• A list of Christmas beers (from a few years back) can be found on the Draft Magazine website.
• Jeff mentions a cooling jacket for brewing lagers that he originally saw on Kickstarter.
• Chris has recently launched a venture, Contextual Electronics, which aims to teach practical skills to those interested in electronics.
• An interactive teaching method, known as Peer Instruction, was created by Harvard Physics professor Eric Mazur to overcome the difficulty that experts have in teaching concepts to beginners.
• A book titled How to Teach Adults provided our guest with some insights about how to organize his instructional material.
• Chris surveyed listeners of The Amp Hour podcast to determine what subject matter should be included in his instructional videos.
• Some existing online resources, in the area of electronics, include Dave Jones’ EEVblog, the Curious Inventor website, and videos by Ben Krasnow, Jeri Elsworth and Alan Wolke.
• Conceptual Electronics is using the open source program KiCad for designing printed circuit boards (PCBs).
• Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are currently a popular topic in the education community.
• Chris has been working with a beta-test group of students to smooth out the rough edges of the course.
• Our guest took inspiration from instructional programs such as Destroy All Software and cadjunkie.
• Fedevel Academy offers a training program for Altium Designer.
• An introductory video program titled Getting to Blinky is available on the Contextual Electronics YouTube channel.
• Chris is quite pleased with his experiences using Vimeo for video distribution. He has already produced 150 videos for his instructional program.
• On a monthly basis, Chris gets together with the Charged Conversation group, comprised of electronics professionals from the Cleveland, Ohio area.
• One of our guest’s sources for marketing ideas is Seth Godin, who often talks about the power of story-telling.
• A project dedicated to creating all the tools needed to build a small village is Open Source Ecology.
• More information about Chris’s instructional program is available on the Contextual Electronics website.
• You can follow Chris on Twitter as @Chris_Gammell, and can listen to his weekly podcast with Dave Jones at The Amp Hour.

Thanks to Chris Gammel for allowing us to use a screen grab from one of his introductory videos as the main image for this episode. Podcast theme music provided by Paul Stevenson