Part of the charter of many FRC teams (including this one!) is to provide service to the community in and around the STEM space, and part of the Astoria High School experience is to do a community-focused senior project.  For Team Business Captain Joey Vasquez, this year's project is to provide technical support to residents of Clatsop Care Assisted Living.  To that end, team 6845 is working toward industry certification in this kind of help desk support via the CompTIA A+ certification.

The A+ is a rigorous, widely-recognized certification that covers:

• Mobile Devices

• Computer Hardware and Operating Systems

• Computer Networking, and

• Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Recipients of the A+ certification are recognized leaders in entry-level IT and helpdesk, and the goal is to both help out the assisted living community here and be the biggest source of organized tech support in Clatsop County.

Students completing this program will:

1. Have an industry-standard certification in IT Helpdesk operations, which will help them serve their community better and be more marketable as they work on college applications and entry-level jobs.

2. Be able to help troubleshoot a variety of mobile and PC hardware, peripherals and devices.

3. Be able to set up and troubleshoot basic computer networks.

• BJ Black has been in and around helpdesks, devops, cloud computing and Internet of Things for almost 30 years and has formally interviewed over 650 technical candidates as part of his work with IBM.

• Tacocat Hospitality is sponsoring the costs of all A+ exams for interested students who pass the Go/No-Go testing the week of Nov 2.

The big push is to do training in October, 2025 and schedule tests for November (before the FRC season starts).  That means:

• October 8 - Kickoff After School in the Robotics Lab, materials (Below) are presented and available to interested members of the team

• October 14-29 (Tues/Weds) - After-School Sessions for "Office Hours," where BJ is available to answer any questions and present on related topics as-needed.

• November 4-5 - "Go/No-Go" final testing and sign up for proctored exams.

• November 10-21 - Exams scheduled and executed for anyone passing the Go/No-Go tests.

The majority of the training to be performed is via the excellent (and free-to-all) Professor Messer's A+ Core 1 course, a 25-hour series of videos on Youtube that covers everything in the Core 1 exam.  The recommended schedule is:

• During kickoff, we will be watching section zero (intro to the certification).

• Week 1 (Oct 8-14), suggest watching section 1 on Mobile Devices.

• Week 2 (Oct 15-21), section 2 on Basic Networking.

• Week 3 (Oct 22-28), section 3 on Hardware.

• Week 4 (Oct 29-Nov 4), sections 4/5 on Virtualization and Troubleshooting.

Quizzes will be available each week during office hours to help validate what students have learned and keep the pace going.

October 8's Pre-Test is provided by CompTIA as their first bank of Core 1 Sample Questions.  How many did you know?