With close instruction and a good deal of prior preparation, classroom organisation and technical help you can get a class of students working in groups of two or three to do most of this work in double lesson of two 50 minute periods. However if this work is two be of any use then portfolio evidence must be gathered along the way and the whole thing written up into a report.

Lesson 1 - Installing the motherboard components

All the requisite components must be gathered together and available.

You will need:

• A screwdriver for every student
• Large flat surfaces to work
• Plenty of places to throw away all of the packaging
• Digital cameras - at least one per group - or you can nominate an assistant to run around taking appropriate photos
• Sticking plasters for when someone cuts themselves (computers don't run all that well covered in blood!)

Safety tips - there is little danger of electrocution in this work but students may damage components with static from their own bodies (and need to be warned of this from the outset and regularly discharge themselves of static change and never handle circuitry - always hold the components by their plastic parts.  They may receive small cuts from motherboards masks (and so may you!)

You should be able to get them to un-box all the bits they need and get through the stages on page assembly 1

Lesson 2 - Installing drives and motherboard in the case

Hot tips

• Make sure that all the students know the difference between the coarse and fine threaded screws and can reliable identify one from another
• Magnet screwdrivers are essential
• Never tighten all the screws holding components until every screw is started

All the stages in assembly 2

Lesson 3 - Connecting the cables and internal components

This is the fiddly stage where some students will get things wrong. The motherboard will have come with instructions as to what wires go where - its a good idea to get you technician to check the connections are right before actually switching the computers on.

Hot tip

• The case lights are LED's and only work if the motherboard connectors are connected the correct way - at least there's a 50/50 chance of getting it right first time!

All of these examples use a motherboard with integrated video, audio and LAN (Local Area Network). Some courses require students to be able to upgrade (say to an alternative video or sound card) and then put back the computer to the original specifications. THis is illustrated in some of the photos below.

Lesson 4 - plenary and write up

Putting all the photos in the shared folders on your network - and batch processing before the students get hold of them will make file management easier. Of course you could go on to install software on the computers and this will involve formatting the drives, installing operating systems, setting up drivers for various components and maybe even networking them together!