Pine-Richland high school labs, elementary faculty to get computers
Pine-Richland is spending more than $200,000 to get new computers for its technology students and elementary faculty.
The district purchased equipment for two engineering labs at the high school and the engineering lab at the middle school for $96,564 and 135 HP laptop computers for all elementary school teachers for $119,038.
The school board approved the purchase at its Nov. 23 voting meeting.
The new equipment will replace aging hardware that is no longer up to speed for the work being done in the engineering labs and the elementary classrooms, said district technology director Shawn Stoebener.
In the high school and middle school engineering labs, the current computers cannot meet the demands of the intense work being done in the robotics and computer aided drafting, or CAD, labs.
Technology education teacher Evan Clark said with the 3D modeling software being used by the students in both labs, students are able to make renderings of 3D models that give a realistic picture of projects. Because of all the parts coming together in the renderings, the files are large and use a lot of memory.
“So the computers we have now, they kind of start to red line when you get so many parts in there,” Clark said. “It's kind of holding us back from the capability of what the kids are able to do.”
In Jeff Maple's CAD and architecture and engineering design courses, students are working on the computers all the time so when a computer freezes or crashes, it backs things up, Maple said.
“The kids will be able to get a lot more accomplished in the time they're in the classroom,” said Clark, who is technology education department chair. “We won't be waiting for things to catch up. As teachers, we'll be able to get students' abilities at a higher level because we'll be spending more time learning the software instead of waiting for things to catch up.
The CAD lab and robotics labs are used seven periods a day, CAD by 175 students daily and robotics by 156 students, Stoebener said. The high school is getting 58 new HP computers between the two labs for $70,111 and the middle school is getting 30 HP computers for $26,453.
The old engineering computers, which are about 4 years old, will be moved to the other computer labs throughout the high school, where they'll work well for Internet use and word processing, Stoebener said.
In the elementary schools, K-3 teachers are having trouble this year with the instructional computers they use every day. The computers lack the processing power and memory necessary to keep up with the graphics and interactive displays being used on the electronic whiteboards.
The faculty computers being replaced are about 3-4 years old and will be used next on student computer carts, where they'll hopefully be used for another 3-4 years, Stoebener said. The new computers should arrive sometime in the next month or so.
“We truthfully put our systems to the full extent of their use,” he said.”We look at purchases, we're not just purchasing things, replacing them and discarding them. We're really being strategic with how things are laid out.”
Part of that strategy is purchasing new devices that have the capability to expand and upgrade as needs change. For example, the current teacher computers have 4GB of RAM memory, while the new ones will come with 8GB memory and be expandable to 32 GB, Stoebener said.
“Both the CAD labs and teacher's laptops were purchased with the ability to have more memory,” he said. “So if we find in the fifth year, they maybe need more life, we can maybe make a smaller investment to upgrade systems to take full advantage of that.”
Rachel Farkas is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at 724-772-6364.
