The weeks are flying by and summer is almost upon us! This Wednesday already marked our 9th trip to Detroit to meet with the Technology Team. This time, Conroy (DE Consultant) came with me to teach his second lesson.
A big part of Conroy’s job at DE is troubleshooting issues for end users. A customer calls him when they can’t print, when their second monitor isn’t working, or when they can’t connect to the internet. Conroy then figures out the source of the problem and repairs it.
We thought it would be interesting to teach the kids how to troubleshoot and solve some basic end user issues. Conroy started off by introducing the group to the OSI problem solving framework. Without getting too in depth, the idea we wanted to convey is to check the most obvious solutions to problems first.
The first layer of the OSI framework is “Physical”. We wanted the students to first check for physical solutions (i.e. cables unplugged, broken parts, etc.)
For the first test, Conroy called up a couple students to set up the projector. They started with “physical” and found the projector was not plugged in. But after they connected the projector it still wasn’t working. We moved to the next layer of the OSI framework — “Data”. The projector was not receiving data from the computer. The students worked through this task as Conroy gave them some direction and eventually got the projector working correctly.
For the rest of the lesson, Conroy would disconnect the projector so the class couldn’t see his screen, “break” something on his laptop, reconnect the projector, and call a student up to solve the problem. Team members figured out how to connect to the internet (while overcoming multiple obstacles), fix display settings, find a missing start menu, and “fix” Internet Explorer.
Learning everything about desktop support takes 2-4 years of classes, but this lesson provided a glimpse into some of the things Conroy does on a day to day basis. Most of the kids agreed solving people’s computer problems wouldn’t be a bad career.yea
Next week, James is going to present his completed audio mixing software! Excited to get my own copy to play around with!
-Bryan
