Basic Electrical & Electronics Engineering
Learn the fundamentals of circuits, electronics, and digital logic — from Ohm's law to your first transistor circuit.
Course overview
Every device with a plug or a battery runs on the same handful of ideas: voltage, current, resistance, and the handful of laws that connect them. This course builds those ideas up from scratch, with no assumed background, so a circuit diagram stops looking like a foreign language.
You'll start with DC circuits and the core theorems used to analyse them, move into capacitors, inductors, and AC behaviour, then cross into electronics proper — diodes, transistors, and the digital logic that underlies every computer. Every topic is paired with worked numeric examples, not just definitions.
By the end, you'll be able to read a circuit diagram, calculate current and voltage through it by hand, explain what a diode or transistor actually does, and safely use a multimeter to check your work — the practical foundation for further electrical, electronics, or computer engineering study.
Learning objectives
By the end of this course, you'll be able to:
- Explain voltage, current, resistance, and power, and how they relate via Ohm's law
- Analyse series and parallel DC circuits, including with Kirchhoff's voltage and current laws
- Apply Thevenin's and Norton's theorems to simplify a network
- Describe how capacitors and inductors behave, including basic transient charging/discharging
- Work with sinusoidal AC quantities: amplitude, frequency, phase, and RMS value
- Explain how a diode and a bipolar transistor work and where each is used
- Read basic digital logic gates and simplify a small Boolean expression
- Use a multimeter safely and correctly to measure voltage, current, and resistance
Complete syllabus
0 / 10 modules complete
Tick off each module as you finish it — your progress is saved on this device.
1. Electrical Fundamentals: Voltage, Current, and Resistance
What voltage, current, and resistance actually are, the water-pipe analogy, and Ohm's law as the relationship between them.
2. DC Circuit Analysis: Series and Parallel
Combining resistors in series and parallel, voltage and current dividers, and power dissipation in a resistor.
3. Kirchhoff's Laws and Network Theorems
Kirchhoff's voltage and current laws for more complex networks, then simplifying them with Thevenin's and Norton's theorems.
4. Capacitors, Inductors, and Transient Response
How capacitors and inductors store energy, and what happens in the first moments after a switch closes (RC and RL charging curves).
5. Alternating Current (AC) Fundamentals
Sinusoidal waveforms, amplitude, frequency, phase, and why RMS — not peak — is the value on every appliance label.
6. AC Circuits: Impedance and Power
How resistors, capacitors, and inductors behave differently in AC circuits, and real vs. reactive power at a beginner's level.
7. Semiconductor Devices: Diodes
What a semiconductor is, how a p-n junction works, and where diodes show up (rectification, protection, LEDs).
8. Semiconductor Devices: Transistors
The bipolar junction transistor as a switch and an amplifier, explained with intuition before the equations.
9. Digital Logic Basics
AND, OR, NOT, and the other basic gates; truth tables; and simplifying a small Boolean expression by hand.
10. Practical Projects, Instrumentation, and Final Assessment
Safe multimeter use, a hands-on circuit project, then the final quiz to unlock your certificate.
Required skills & prerequisites
- No prior electrical or electronics experience required
- Comfortable with basic algebra (rearranging a simple equation)
- Curiosity about how circuits and electronic devices actually work
- A multimeter and a basic component kit are helpful for module 10, but not required to follow the theory
Tools & technologies
Practical projects
Resistor network solver
Work through a mixed series-parallel resistor network by hand, then verify it in a circuit simulator.
Thevenin equivalent circuit
Reduce a small network to its Thevenin equivalent and confirm it produces the same output as the original.
RC timing circuit
Build (or simulate) a simple RC charging circuit and predict its transient response before testing it.
Capstone: simple transistor switch
Design a basic transistor circuit that switches an LED on and off, explaining every component's role.
Instructor
AI Tutor Spark
Course design & AI tutoring
This course was built by the team at AI Tutor Spark, behind its step-by-step tutoring approach. Every module is paired with an AI tutor you can question directly — paste a circuit or a calculation and ask it to walk through where you went wrong.
Frequently asked questions
No. The course starts from what voltage and current actually are, with no assumed background beyond basic algebra.
No — every circuit can be built and tested in a free online simulator. Real components are a nice-to-have for module 10, not a requirement.
Work through the modules, then pass the short final quiz on this page (70% or higher). Your certificate becomes available to download immediately.
Yes — every module links to the AI Tutor Spark AI tutor chat, pre-set to Basic Electrical & Electronics Engineering, so you can ask follow-up questions any time.
No — this course is deliberately a fundamentals course: DC and single-phase AC circuits, plus an introduction to diodes, transistors, and digital logic. It's the foundation those advanced topics build on.
Final quiz & certificate
Score 70% or higher to unlock your certificate. You can retake the quiz as many times as you like.
1. Ohm's law relates voltage, current, and resistance as:
2. In a series circuit, the current through each component is:
3. Kirchhoff's current law states that at any junction:
4. The RMS value of an AC voltage is used because it:
5. A diode's main electrical property is that it:
6. In digital logic, an AND gate outputs a 1 (true) when:
Ready to start Basic Electrical & Electronics Engineering?
Free to start. Enroll, then jump straight into module one.