What right now sits as an empty room with bare walls and brand new technology will soon become the place of research and discovery for Thousand Oaks High School CENTER students.
The Center of Research Excellence, or CoRE, Innovation Lab is a new facility opening up on campus for students enrolled in the Center for Advanced Studies and Research, soon to be complete with 3D printers, an interactive Promethean Smart Table, and other equipment designed to help students conduct original research.
There was a soft launch for the new facility this morning, attended by Principal Dr. Eric Bergmann, CVUSD board members, students, alumni, and the teachers who will be putting the room to use starting this year.
“I think it provides a safer and more technologically advanced environment for students to conduct their research” Center alumnae and UCLA student Joy Hong said.
Students will now have a convenient and local space for working on their projects and experiments with approved mentors.
“It was all primary research so I got companies to donate stuff to me to conduct experiments in Dr. Nikki Malhotra’s lab,” Hong said. “[The CoRE Lab] provides an additional safe and technologically advanced environment for students to conduct their research.”
The space will be adaptable to the needs of both the individual students and the classes using it.
“It raises the ceiling [for] the things we can do,” said school counselor Bill Zasadil. “It just offers a lot more options… and will promote more growth.”
Before the introduction of the CoRE Lab project, the classroom sat unused in the back of the “A” building. Bergmann and school faculty realized the need for a safe and effective facility for higher level research.
“We were looking at this old unused huge space and we knew we had a need,” Bergmann said. “So it was a matter of sitting down with the really smart people from the district office and saying ‘Hey this is the space, this is what we would like, can we make this a reality?’”
What started out as a vision from the Center teachers and school faculty has come to fruition as a fully-fledged research facility to aid advanced students in their research and studies, and will continue to be used by both present and future Lancers.
