High-Tech Lab Gives Students a Jump on 21st Century

Bill Burt was bent backward limbo-style with his head on a table, staring up at a video camera mounted overhead. His lips quivered as he strained to keep from cracking up.

“Don’t laugh,” his seventh-grade classmates yelled. “Stop!”

The camera was hooked into a “digitizer” that was transforming the picture of his face into an image that could be stored on a computer disk, like a snapshot in an electronic photo album.

Nearby, Medea Creek Middle School students Jeremy Feiger and Zack Mark were puzzling over the construction of a gear-propelled elevator. They couldn’t quite figure out how a motor that spun around and around could make a machine move up and down.

Mike Farr and Parham Holakouee were tinkering with an electronic circuit so it would chirp and light a bulb when they pushed a switch.

Other teams of students were crushing soda cans in a “structural stress analyzer,” piloting a Cessna airplane on a computer flight simulator, assembling a Rube Goldberg-type contraption powered solely by air pressure, and checking on lettuce and pepper sprouts in little hydroponic greenhouses.

Their spacious classroom was stuffed with computers, state-of-the-art electronic equipment, and all manner of gizmos and gadgets, including a small wind tunnel.

Last year, these students would have been carving key rings and hat racks in wood shop.

But when parents and administrators in Oak Park designed the Medea Creek school, which opened this year, they decided shop was as relevant to today’s students as adding machines and eight-track tapes.

“We wanted to look for something that would better prepare students for the 21st Century,” Medea Creek Principal Laurel Ford said. “We were looking for a way to make technology accessible to the kids.”

So instead of a $70,000 shop, the school district spent $175,000 for the Technology Lab 2000.

Eighth-grader Ryan Cheney said he enjoys the lab more than the shop class he took last year, when middle school students attended Oak Park High School.

“It’s a lot more fun because you’re working with modern technology. Most of the things we build in wood shop you might use once or twice. This you might use the rest of our life,” Ryan said.

Students work in teams and rotate among several stations. As one team learns aerodynamics on the flight simulator, another builds a rolling robot. Other teams design cars or publish newsletters.

The lab depends heavily on Apple computers, but it is not just a computer lab.

“We’re trying to get the kids to a level of technological literacy,” said Robert Brillantes of Creative Learning Systems, the San Diego company that designed the lab. “They’ve got to be prepared for what’s to come in the future.”

He said that more than 200 schools in the United States and Canada have installed a Technology 2000 Lab.

In Ventura County, the Hueneme Elementary School District has two Technology Labs, at E. O. Green and Charles Blackstock junior high schools.

At E. O. Green, the 4-year-old lab is a popular elective.

Principal Deloris Carn said a survey of high school science students who had attendeO. Green listed the lab as their favorite class.

At Oak Park, the lab is used for two elective classes a day. Beginning later this month, all seventh-graders will take the lab as part of a 10-week “exploration” class.

The mandatory class may resolve one concern. Only one of the lab’s 60 students is a girl.

She is eighth-grader Ayesha Sayeedi, who was working quietly at one station measuring temperatures and light intensity. Another girl had been her lab partner, but the girl dropped out after a few days of class.

“When (boys) grow up, they tend to be engineers and stuff and it helps them more. Girls are more interested in art or creative writing,” Ayesha said.

She said she is more inclined to art, and acknowledged that the lab wasn’t exactly her idea.

“My dad wanted me to take it,” she said. “He thought it would come to be more important in the future than art.” He told her that the computer skills she learned would also help her in art.

The low interest among girls concerns Shoshana Brower, a board member of the American Assn. of University Women in Thousand Oaks.

The national AAUW--the group whose complaints forced Mattel Inc. to change a talking Barbie doll that opined “math class is tough”--has urged that girls be encouraged to take math and science classes.

“Somehow, girls are getting the message, whether from teachers, parents or society, that math and science are not appropriate for girls,” Brower said.

But the Medea Creek principal said it is too early for such criticism.

“I absolutely agree with them that girls need to be involved in math and science and technology,” Principal Ford said. “That’s why it’s going to be a seventh-grade requirement for boys and girls.”

Ford said many girls may not have signed up for the lab because it was new and they didn’t realize how much fun it is.

“The teacher who will be teaching that seventh-grade exploratory is a woman, so we’ll have a man and a woman role model for this program,” Ford said.

The current lab teacher, Dave Becker, normally teaches history but volunteered for the lab because of his interest in computers.

“We want the computer to become second nature, like your pencil. It’s a tool,” he said.

Becker doesn’t lecture, but wanders from station to station, checking progress and giving hints.

At the gear station, Jeremy and Zack were having trouble figuring out how to make their elevator.

“Mr. Becker, if we don’t get this will we fail?” Jeremy asked.

Becker gave the teacher’s classic response:

“You’ll get it,” he assured them.

The shop fulfills one of the missions of a traditional shop class, which is to provide a different way of learning to students who don’t always do well in the classroom.

“A lot of these kids don’t experience the same kind of success in school that they experience here,” Becker said. “Here’s a place where they, with perseverance, can have success building something new. They don’t get that by regurgitating facts.”

Becker acknowledged that even he doesn’t know how to use all of the equipment in the lab.

“There is a lot of sophistication built into this that we just aren’t at,” he said.

An audio-visual station that includes a laser disc player, a videocassette recorder that can be run by a computer, a music synthesizer, speakers, amplifiers, a boom microphone and backdrops hasn’t been used yet. A half-dozen remote controls in plastic wrappers sit on a shelf.

And no one has cranked up the wind tunnel yet.

Meanwhile, at the popular digitizer station, Bill Burt had managed to stay still long enough for the computer to finish scanning his face. When it was finished, Bill’s image stared back at him from the computer’s monitor.

It looked gray and fuzzy. No problem.

With a few flicks of a computer’s keys, Bill and his classmates touched up the picture. By sliding one gauge on the screen they made it lighter. With a touch of another button, they flipped right and left to make a mirror-image of his face. For fun, they reversed black and white and made his face look like the negative on a roll of film.

Then they printed the result on a laser printer.

Bill cast a critical eye on the finished product.

“It came out good,” he decided. “But it didn’t come out that good.”