Earlier during the fall semester, Glen Stone, instructor of Electronics Technology at Central Georgia Technical College, made his routine trek to Putnam County High School where he teaches 13 Move on When Ready dual enrollment students.

In the Electronics Technology course, students are asked daily to hone new skills on an array of tasks that prepare them for technician-level jobs in various high-technology fields where they would work on equipment for hospitals, aviation electronics, alarm systems, consumer electronics, and a vast assortment of other applications of electronics.

But on a regular Wednesday, Stone brought with him eleven damaged video boards discarded from the Information Technology department at the College and told his students they were going to make these video boards operable. The students were tasked with making the boards work again, not just for their own learning, but as a service to the College.

“My dual enrollment students at Putnam County High School are very motivated and bright,” Stone said. “They seemed truly interested in the prospect of performing such a relatively simple task that could be considered so valuable to others. They were genuinely pleased to know that they performed a service to Central Georgia Technical College, the school that gave them the very skills they employed in this task.”

Stone explained that video boards or officially, video interface circuit boards, take digital data processed by a computer and send it to the video monitor. All of the images, from fonts, to pictures and video, are processed by these boards. Modern video boards can even include HDMI output, for connecting directly to a television.

The bad video boards were something the IT department would not normally repair and something entirely new for these students.  A technician from the Macon campus actually brought the defective boards to his office and asked Stone if they might be repairable. Stone said the problem was a bad capacitor, a common electronic component. Stone was confident his students could perform the necessary repairs.

“I reasoned that if they were successful, their efforts would potentially save CGTC more than a thousand dollars, and if not, the bad boards were destined for disposal anyway,” Stone said.

Stone reviewed steps and necessary safety measures to assure they were technically prepared for this project, and as it got going, they saw rapid success.

The process to get these video boards running again looked roughly like this;

Step 1: Set a soldering iron to about 745 degrees Fahrenheit.

Step 2: Melt the existing solder, usually an alloy of tin and lead, to remove the defective capacitor from the board.

Step 3: Place and install the new capacitor and solder it in place on the board.

Simple enough, right?

“This may sound simple, and it is with proper training, but very few individuals take the time or make the effort to learn these skills that my students have mastered,” Stone said.

The project took well under an hour for his class. Their focus and skills made short work of the task.

Stone returned the repaired boards to Perry Parks, assistant academic lab administrator in IT on the Macon campus, and he tested each of them. Parks reported that all of the boards now work fine and can now be used to put computers back in service on the campuses.

Because the boards had to be returned to be tested, students did not get to see the finished process, but in class they saw how it would fit into a PC and then got to hear the good news.

“Glen’s students on the Macon Campus had repaired some video cards for us before so I wasn’t surprised,” Parks said. “He does a good job teaching his students but, I was impressed when I found out that it was high school students that did the job.  I told Glen to tell the students that they did a great job and we really appreciated them repairing the cards for us. This saves the school a lot of money and saves us time in having to wait for parts to come in.”

The next project for PCHS MOWR students will likely involve other donated electronics. Old PCs and VCRs fit the bill. In the end, Stone has discovered this very basic truth about his group;

“I have found that by studying things that are already made, they can learn how things work, and how to fix them if they don't.”

All routine work for aspiring Electronics Technicians.