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Spectrum Analyzer Course Description

This site supports a fun hands-on 14-week course on understanding data transformation using low-cost components. Although we target high-school students, we have content that is designed to be used by both junior-high students as well as college-level students studying signal processing and digital signal processing.

The underlying goals of this course is to teach principals of computational thinking, problem solving, data literacy and visualization of data transformations. These are universal skills that can be applied in many other areas of STEM education.

Although many of the exercises in this class focus on software, there are no requirements that you have a strong software background to learn things from this course. Students that have a background in Python or JavaScript will have more opportunities to customize the labs, but there is plenty of content for non-programmers.

Prerequisites

This course makes an assumption that all students will have access to the internet and know how to use a keyboard, mouse and a web browser. No coding skills are required.

Concepts

  • What is a signal
  • What is a tone
  • What is pitch or frequency of a signal
  • How sounds are composed of multiple frequencies of sounds
  • What are base and treble controls
  • How base and treble controls change the frequency response of music
  • What instruments like a base create low notes
  • What instruments like cymbals create high notes
  • What is a sound frequency spectrum
  • How do we visualize sound in real time
  • Filters: ways to separate sound frequencies
  • Crossovers: sending low notes to a subwoofer
  • Digital Signal Processing
  • Parts of a waveform: frequency, amplitude and phase
  • Waveform types: sine, square, triangle and sawtooth
  • Combining waves of different frequencies
  • Decomposing a complex wave into components