In my one-day Tech class, we briefly touch on how energy is stored in an electric field in a capacitor and a magnetic field in an inductor, and I try to make the connection between this concept, the concept of resonance, and how you might use a circuit made up of inductors and capacitors to generate an electromagnetic, or radio, wave. Of course, I really don’t have time to explain this fully, but I do want to give them a taste for why this is important.
Having said that, I recently ran across this video, an old military training video that explains electronic oscillation to mechanical oscillation.
I’ll be referring my students to these videos in the future. Hopefully, these videos will help them understand the concept, and thereby, have more fun with amateur radio.