High School STEM Lab Brings Design and Engineering Concepts to Students

Get more students interested in STEM. That’s been the mantra from Washington and from technology leaders across the country. Science, Technology, Engineering and Math are heavily emphasized and will likely continue to be for some time. The Charlottesville City Schools have taken this mission to heart with the addition of two STEM learning labs located at the middle and high school.

“One of our students was quoted as saying football players have a football field and sports players have sports fields, and our musicians have the orchestra room…but where’s the place for the geeks,” says Jeff Faust, director of technology at Charlottesville City schools.

The student was joking, but the comment kicked off a very real conversation within the district. School leaders knew there was an interest in STEM subjects, particularly because of the growth of the BACON club. It’s not bacon like most of you are probably thinking. The word is an acronym for “Best All Around Club of Nerds,”—that’s a name the club members chose themselves. In recent years the club has grown from it’s original four or five members to about 100 active members.

“We knew with that club and that momentum that we had students who really saw a need for expressing themselves through technology and expressing themselves through creation, programming, robotics and different engineering concepts,” says Faust. “We saw a need to create a space to foster that.”

The district’s first STEM lab was built in its middle school. The second and newest addition is The Sigma Lab located at Charlottesville High School. It’s design is based on an actual advanced manufacturing facility south of Richmond, Virginia. After touring the plant, school leaders decided to build something similar on a smaller scale that would be comparable to what they had seen. Construction on the Sigma Lab was completed over the summer.

Inside the Sigma Lab

“We did a demolition down to the steel and concrete,” Faust says.

When students returned to school in August they had a brand new space where they could explore concepts of science, engineering, robotics and manufacturing. The Sigma Lab is designed to mimic the workflow of a real commercial manufacturing operation. It’s made up of several different areas. The first is a design lab with small group spaces meant for collaboration. These areas have a sliding glass door to create an almost soundproof space. They also have writable walls and an interactive LCD display.

Next, students take their ideas to a room with Lenovo all-in-one workstations where they can login and access different CAD and design programs. These programs are used to create a digital representation of the students’ ideas. The room also features two video walls made up of NEC 46-inch X464UNV displays. These video walls are used to share student work as well as other as other types of educational content related to the class at hand.

When it came to choosing displays for the Sigma Lab, Faust had two basic criteria. He wanted thin bezels and the lowest power consumption possible.

“Having thin bezels that are nearly non-existant was important. We wanted it to feel like one giant video wall and not two LCD’s butted together and then four LCD’s butted together,” Faust says.