The Help Desk Shift

A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation on running a student IT help desk through a school district's 1:1 laptop rollout, for high-school Career and Technical Education in IT support and network systems, work-based-learning help desks and courses preparing entry-level IT credentials.

Teodora Quintrell, 17, the fictional lead of a student help desk in Tippen Creek, Indiana, has ten student techs and 400 desk hours for the week of Monday 2 August 2027, when 9,000 students receive a laptop before classes start on Monday 9 August.

Round by round you choose how tickets reach the desk and in what order they are worked, how the desk troubleshoots and who may reset a password, how to handle 640 laptops that fail at once and when to escalate to Tier 2, and how tickets are documented and closed and what to tell a caller asking for a student's password; at each decision point the week is projected again with the decisions taken so far.

Each round is scored on students ready for Monday, priority tickets on time, tickets still open, satisfaction and the district's trust; a password reset without identity verification or a disclosure to an unverified caller (FERPA, 34 CFR 99.31(c)) caps the score. English with Spanish.

An introductory simulation that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, designed for undergraduate courses. It also works in vocational and high-school programmes and in onboarding sessions.