Course Overview: 

Delivery Options:

• Public Hands-On Training
• Onsite Training

Length: 2-days

Percent Hands-on: 75%

Description: This course helps the student gain a solid understanding of the key concepts of basic electricity to allow them to make sense of more advanced topics and build the necessary foundation for success in any instrumentation, electrical, or automation role. 

Course Approach: 

Rather than spewing out formulas and math equations or forcing students to blindly memorize the standard E=IR chart, this course uses a series of thought provoking, visually intuitive, hands-on exercises that allow the students to ‘experiment’ in an open-ended way to directly observe relationships involved in basic electricity and Ohm’s Law, to develop a real, working understanding of the core concepts that underly everything in electrical related fields. 

Since these concepts are central to all work in the electrical field and since these concepts are the cause of most common weakness even in senior electricians or technicians, we focus on making sure that the students truly understand these concepts in a practical, functional way. From there we build upon these critically important fundamentals.

Many other courses rely on memory to simply crunch numbers - but that does not equate to learning or understanding. We work hard to sink home the concepts that are most critical to success in any field that relies on electrical concepts (electricians, instrumentation, automation, etc.). 

As an example, for one of many lab exercises in this course, students will construct simple, low voltage DC circuits which include adjustable power supplies, incandescent lamps, inline mA meters, and various other components in various circuit arrangements to help them visualize the relationships of voltage, current, and resistance in series, parallel, and complex circuit arrangements. By predicting and observing the relative brightness of numerous lamps and manipulating the circuit, students develop a functional understanding and visualization of how electrical circuits actually work.

Once students fully understand and can intuitively understand the relationships of voltage, current and resistance and the concepts of series and parallel circuits, we begin to apply these concepts in increasingly complex circuits and begin to have the students solve realistic problems. 

Students will be given lab challenges in which they strive to predict the results before running or testing various circuits and will analyze and compare their findings to their predictions to help lock in the concepts. 

This methodology has proven extremely successful in these types of courses because it allows personnel to learn and fully grasp the underlying concepts and to build upon them in a logical and natural way that aligns with the way that technicians typically learn. Our courses not only have hands-on as a key component, - but we carefully design each lab exercise to create sold cognitive connections and to form an intuitive understanding of the concepts, and we then build upon those concepts in a way that matches how we naturally learn. The result is greater long-term retention; better ability to use the information in a useful way in the field; and better ability to build upon the information in future learning. 

This approach works extremely well for wide range of technicians. It works extremely well for persons with zero experience in electricity - but has also proven amazingly helpful to senior technicians who learned the underlying concepts along the way much earlier in their career but who never fully understood some key concepts or have forgotten them through the years (as often happens). We find that reinforcing the fundamentals is incredibly helpful to ensuring real results that last and for this reason we automatically include this course as a prequel to our public Electrical Troubleshooting courses. 

Benefit: 

This course is extremely helpful in preparing personnel with minimal training or experience in electrical concepts for more advanced training (such as for our Electrical Troubleshooting course or Instrumentation course). Even Journeyman level electricians and technicians typically find this course very valuable and extremely effective at solidifying concepts that became hazy over time. 

Course objectives: 

• Be able to relate physical circuits to wiring diagrams and electrical schematics.
• Intuitively visualize the relationships of current, voltage, and resistance in a circuit (rather than memorizing formulas) via hands-on exercises and demonstrations.
• Understand the relationships of power, energy and wattage in practical ways via hands-on exercises and demonstrations. 
• Be able to utilize the concepts associated with Ohm’s Law to solve typical problems in electrical circuits.
• Understand how current and voltages behave in series, parallel, and combination series + parallel circuits. 
• Be able to utilize a digital multimeter to properly measure voltage, current, and resistance. 
• Be aware of tips and tricks, and common mistakes when using digital multimeters in electrical troubleshooting and maintenance. 
• Understand and be able to read and interpret basic electrical schematics, one-line diagrams, and wiring diagrams. 
• Gain familiarity with common electrical components.
• Gain practice testing, analyzing, and troubleshooting common simple electrical components such as resistors, potentiometers, rheostats, disconnects, fuses, circuit breakers.
• Learn to test and analyze the operation of key electrical operational components such as switches, indicators, solenoids, relays, motors, capacitors, inductors & inductive loads, etc..
• Understand the basics electrical safety. 

 Hands-on Exercises

• Construct a series of series and parallel circuits using our modular quick-connect components such as (switches, resistors, potentiometers, float switches, batteries, power supplies, lamps, relays, fuses, circuit breakers, motors, generators, diodes, LED's, capacitors, etc.).
• Students will predict and then observe the operation of each circuit and solve various problems assigned by instructor.
• Typically, students will be quizzed to guess what will happen prior to manipulating the circuit. This is to help 'open the box' in their minds. Then we make the change and answer the natural questions that arise. This approach best matches how people truly learn technical concepts and has proven tremendously successful at developing real understanding and long-lasting skills that can be built upon and expanded. This is one of many things that cause our training to deliver superior 'long-term' results. 
• As the course progresses, students will build and integrate an increasing knowledgebase and understanding of key concepts.

Course Notes

• We are not only striving to teach the material; we are striving to develop the ability for each student to use the acquired knowledge to continue learning and growing, long after the class ends.
• The number one root cause of all skills deficiencies in the instrumentation and electrical fields is nearly always associated with a weaknesses in the fundamental concepts that are covered in this course.
• The skills and concepts covered in this course often make a bigger difference overall for Instrumentation & Electrical personnel than any other training, seminar, or class.