Digital electronics labs for high school engineering and CTE
Logic gates, adders, flip-flops, counters, the 555 and an Arduino, on real 74HC chips and a breadboard, in a browser tab on the Chromebooks you already have. Every lab below runs now, with nothing to install.
Where Mokxi fits
Many US high schools teach a digital electronics course in a pre-engineering or career and technical education (CTE) pathway, including courses built on the Project Lead The Way Digital Electronics model. The topics are much the same everywhere: analog foundations, combinational logic, sequential logic, timing, and then a microcontroller. Mokxi has a working circuit for each.
The chips are real parts, not ideal symbols: 74HC gates, flip-flops, counters, decoders and shift registers as 14 and 16 pin packages with supply pins that have to be wired, supply-relative thresholds and propagation delay. A student who forgets to power a chip sees it fail the way it would on the bench.
The later units move to an Arduino Uno or an ESP32 in the same editor, with C++ compiled in the browser, so a course does not change tools halfway through.
Mokxi is not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by Project Lead The Way. PLTW is a trademark of Project Lead The Way, Inc. The topics above are generic, follow no publisher’s numbering, and the circuits are ours.
The labs, by topic
Each row is a topic, the week of the 12-week course that covers it, a circuit that runs now and the pages that explain it.
Every week has a one-page PDF lesson plan. They are all on the teacher resources page.
Where it does not fit
- There is no programmable logic: no FPGA or CPLD, and no VHDL or Verilog. Karnaugh maps are worked on paper and then built with chips; there is no K-map tool.
- Microcontroller code is text C++ only. There are no blocks.
- It is not PCB design software, and it does not replace soldering or a real bench. Most teachers use it to design and test first, then build a few circuits for real.
Standards this course touches
Mokxi is not certified against any of these. The rows below are the ones this course’s labs genuinely touch, taken from the full map on the teacher resources page.
| Standard | What it asks | Fit | Where Mokxi fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| NGSS HS-PS3-3 | Design, build, and refine a device that works within given constraints to convert one form of energy into another form of energy. | Partial fit | The design and refine steps: students design circuits that turn electrical energy into light, sound or motion (an LED, a buzzer, a motor) and test them before building. The build itself is physical, and a simulator does not replace it. |
| NGSS HS-ETS1-4 | Use a computer simulation to model the impact of proposed solutions to a complex real-world problem with numerous criteria and constraints. | Partial fit | The simulation practice: predict, simulate, compare against the prediction, and name the model’s limits (every part’s help page lists what it does not model). The problems are circuit sized, not whole real-world systems. |
| CSTA 3B-CS-02 | Illustrate ways computing systems implement logic, input, and output through hardware components. | Good fit | Weeks 5 to 8: logic gates on 74HC chips, a full adder built from gates, flip-flops, counters and a shift register, all on a breadboard. |
States adopt these frameworks with their own edits, and some use their own (Texas uses the TEKS, for example). Check the wording in your state’s document. If you send us a unit, we will tell you which weeks cover it and which do not.
Wording from: NGSS: HS-PS3-3 · NGSS: HS-ETS1 Engineering Design · NGSS: MS-ETS1-4 · CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards · College Board: AP Physics 2 course page · College Board: AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism course page
More for this course
Digital electronics on Chromebooks, one circuit per unit · Moving a class off Multisim Live · SkillsUSA Electronics Technology practice · TSA Electrical Applications practice · The logic gate simulator · All the free teacher resources · The 12-week course · IT setup for schools
Other course pages: Middle school STEM: first circuits · Intro and AP physics: circuits