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Kent Career/Technical Center
Electronics Class & Internship

What is KC/TC

Home page available at: http://www.kc-tc.org

The Kent Career/Technical Center is part of the Kent Intermediate School District (KISD) in Michigan. It is a vocational education school for upper level high school students, high school graduates and adults. It has a vast array of offered courses in over thirty career areas, some of which are multiple year programs. Classes are usually 2 hours and 15 minutes long and are in addition to students course work at their home high school. The facility is very large and houses a vary diverse population of students from all over Kent county. Course work is a combination of written theory in a classroom and hands on application in lab. The work done at KC/TC is partly in-house, but it is also a community service for the greater Grand Rapids area.

Electronics Curriculum

The program I was involved in was the electronics cluster. This is a two year program for high school juniors and seniors and focus on many topic areas. The areas were covered first in the classroom as theory and then demonstrated and tested in the lab by both instructors and students. The course grade was assigned by homework, tests, lab work, lab evaluations and attendance. The main topics were:

AC & DC electronics (RLC theory) AM/FM stereo radio Number systems and Boole Digital Logic Math concepts Microprocessor technology & interfacing

Resistive/Reactive circuits Semiconductor devices & circuits Troubleshooting and diagnostics Servicing of audio/radio/tv circuits Test equipment operation Safety Measures

In addition to this course work, other topics were covered but not in such depth. After the initial course work and lab work was completed, a portion of lab time was spent troubleshooting and servicing consumer electronics equipment brought in by the local community and repaired only for the cost of parts. This allowed the class to move away from just theory and structured labs, to real world experience.

Internship

I completed this entire curriculum as a high school sophomore under the instruction of James Koepsell and Gary VanVels. It was at KC/TC where I reaffirmed my love of electronics because this was the first place I could use my knowledge and theory productively. I was invited back to KC/TC as a junior to be a teacher and lab assistant for the second year electronics course. There were five goals of the internship

• Assist Mr. Koepsell and Mr. VanVels with preparation and running labs
• Assist with course instruction of students
• Continue education of analog and digital electronics
• Utilize the expertise and facilities of KC/TC for further education
• Work on special projects of personal interest

I found the project time to be very fun and I was able to explore microcontrollers, vacuum tube equipment and servicing, advanced servicing techniques, and work on Mission Possible for Science Olympiad. What was most rewarding though was the instructional time. It was at KC/TC that I discovered how much I like to teach other students what I know. Teaching was a new sense of enthusiasm for me and it did not matter that the other students were a year older than me. Overall, my time at KC/TC was the most productive and fun educational experience of my high school career.