If there were such thing as home field advantage when it comes to science classrooms, Lincoln Hall Middle School administrators say their teachers and students now have it.
The renovation of the school science rooms — both STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) labs and general classroom labs — mean more than just nice surroundings. Teachers are now able to expand their teaching in a way that accommodates learning in the new millennium, they say.
“Curriculum has driven the entire STEM lab concept,” said Lincolnwood School District 74 Supt. Kim Nasshan. “We’re using Project Lead The Way so students are with robotics in eighth grade, and they’ve gone to a robotics competition. It’s just exploding.”
The Project Lead The Way program aims to reinvent the classroom, according to its website.
“Our pathways in computer science, engineering, and biomedical science engage students in hands-on activities, projects, and problems; empower them to solve real-world challenges; and inspire them to reimagine how they see themselves,” Project Lead The Way officials say.
School District 74 has completed two of three phases of a major renovation for the Lincolnwood middle school including the science lab upgrades. All three phases are expected to cost under $24 million, according to district officials.
In the first phase last year, state-of-the-art STEM labs were created, featuring more space and an area for computer work. This year, upgraded general science labs were rolled out, completing the science overhaul.
The labs include more storage space and tables that can be adjusted in height to accommodate experiments and other work, said Lincoln Hall Middle School Principal Dominick Lupo. He emphasized that one of the biggest selling points of the new rooms is flexibility where furniture can be grouped in a variety of ways depending on the assignment.
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“Every time you walk in here there’s a different design,” Nasshan said. “They’re either standing for a lab or sitting for a lab, they’re in fours or a different grouping.”
The tables were set up in more traditional rows during a recent look-in — just as you would expect to see in a science classroom.
“This current configuration represents the old method,” said School District 74 school board President Scott Anderson. “You’ll go into another classroom and these tables with be pushed together for a different kind of learning.”
Renovated science and STEM labs can be found on every floor of the school — eighth grade on the first floor, seventh on the second floor and sixth on the third floor. The layout is more efficient and better coordinated than it used to be, Lupo said.
In teacher Steve Gerber’s seventh grade STEM class, students made configurations out of pipe cleaner that were meant be “earthquake-steady.” He wheeled out the student works so students could have a say as to who the winner should be.
Last year, the students of six grade science teacher Bennett Nelson used computers to design a miniature golf course and then built the holes in an adjoining room with a sliding door. Lupo said the new STEM labs allow for this usable additional space for such projects.
STEM has become part of the Lincoln Hall School’s core curriculum, Lupo said. All students now take STEM so the upgrades were needed, he said.
Seventh grade science teacher Sharon Churchwell said her students took a popcorn kernel and put it in water with the aim of making it grow. The experiment was conducted in one of the upgraded non-STEM science labs, providing her and her students with much more space, she said.
“This is really amazing compared to what we had,” she said. “We have space now to have a hood where (students) can grow bacteria and do other experiments.”
Churchwell said she has wanted to do an experiment around bio-fuel but never had the space before.
“I also hope to set up stations where the students gather their own supplies,” she said. “The high school would like the students to be more independent and now that can happen. Just to be able to group the students differently makes a big difference too.”
The new science and STEM labs are only one piece of the larger renovation project at Lincoln Hall.
In the just-completed second phase, updates and renovations also included music, band and orchestra rooms, fitness and health classrooms, the student learning center and the stage, according to School District 74 officials.
Lupo said more students are participating in music as he showed off upgrades for band and orchestra as well as a room to be used as a recording studio.
Nearly 80 students at the middle school are in orchestra, around 50 in band, which means almost 50 percent of the school population takes extra-curricular music, he said.
Another room currently under construction will soon become a new fitness center, allowing the the school district to emphasize overall wellness more, according to educators.
“The (renovation) has always been about the curriculum,” Lupo said. “That’s been behind all the phases — how our kids learn now.”
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