Prebuild

The plan is to combine the jobs that were formerly known as Hardware Sorting, Card Sorting, Motherboard Sorting, Eval 1, and Case Management (Hardware ID) into one new educational area called Hardware Identification. Some functions from Case Management would go to System Evaluation. System Evaluation would expand in slots and space available. Hardware Identification would try to be a drop in and learn space and students could demonstrate discrete skills needed to go into build. Once these skills had been demonstrated, they'd be free to do some time as System Evaluation and then move on to Build.

There would be a basic set of skills that each student would have to demonstrate proficiency in. There would also be intermediate skills. They would only need to demonstrate a percentage of the intermediate skills. We could record the basic skills as a checklist on their status sheet, and also list the "extra credit" skills they have as well.

Basic skills
Students would have to demonstrate that they know all this stuff to move on. (This is a preliminary list.)


 * differentiate between memory slots and card slots in a motherboard
 * identify a PCI, PCI-e, and AGP card
 * identify a network card (not a modem), a wireless card, a sound card, and a video card from each other
 * identify where the processor goes on the motherboard
 * size a hard drive
 * identify the three main types of DIMMs
 * size RAM
 * enter BIOS on at least two different kind of systems (with different BIOSes)
 * identify hard drives
 * differentiate between regular CD drives, DVDs, rewriteable or recordable CDs
 * find an IDE cable
 * open and close three styles of cases without breaking them (an easy, a medium, and a hard)
 * spot a blown capacitor

Intermediate skills
Students might have to demonstrate that they know some percentage of this stuff to move on, but they wouldn't need to know all of it. (This is a preliminary list.)


 * test button batteries
 * test power supplies
 * identify an Ultra Speed and High Speed rewriteable or recordable CD
 * identify ISA, EISA, VESA, and MCA slots and cards
 * determine the speed of a NIC