[EastSideHBG]

Thanks a lot for the info, Chris!!! I am REALLY excited about the Northern and Southern Gateway projects. :carrot:

Some more great news. This stepped things up a knotch for the area IMO:

SCITECH'S HOME

New school offers hands-on learning

Saturday, August 28, 2004
BY MEGAN WALDE
Of The Patriot-News

Imagine a classroom with no single point of focus.

A classroom where the podium serves as a technical control center as much as it does a place for a teacher to rest his elbows.

A classroom where lessons can be instantly delivered to the floor above or below, even to the home of a student out sick.

That kind of classroom is now in downtown Harrisburg. Harrisburg University's Science and Technology High School, called SciTech High, at its new home on Market Street.

Mayor Stephen R. Reed, state officials and representatives of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology and the Harrisburg School District officially opened the doors to SciTech High yesterday as a crowd of students, staff and parents filled Market Street with cheers.

SciTech opened last year in the Rowland School with an enrollment of 155 students. The new SciTech welcomes more than 300 students for classes Monday.

Reed said he hopes the SciTech students eventually go to the four-year Harrisburg University, which the mayor said is to begin offering classes next year. Reed says that might still happen, even if it means using temporary sites during construction of other university buildings.

On Monday, SciTech High students will walk through doors secured by key card access, down locker-lined halls filled with natural light and into classrooms buzzing with the latest technology, all to the same end -- to help them learn.

"It's not that the technology is there for technology's sake," said Joe Chiarella, senior technology officer for Harrisburg University. "It's about what the technology enables. It's there to make personal, individual and collaborative learning possible."

It's personal, starting with the way students sign on to their wireless laptops: Their fingerprints are the key to their machine's software.

Common areas, such as the library/resource room on the first floor, offer a variety of places for students to do their thing. Some students will work better in a comfortable chair by a window onto Market Street. Others will prefer standard table-and-chair study areas or wooden bench seats behind a large projection screen.

And while SciTech has classrooms and labs for each subject like any other school, its teachers and students have unique tools there to communicate and collaborate.

Traditional lecture-style classrooms are set up with diagonal rows of desks, a podium (with a docking station for the teacher's laptop on top and cup holder on each side) and projection screens on two walls.

Other rooms are set up similarly, but with desks in a U-shape or groupings.

The teacher can project an image on one screen, a video on the second, and an assignment on the students' laptop screens. A social studies class might use the screens to compare and contrast two TV news broadcasts.

Cameras in each lab and classroom mean a math class on the second floor can use a physics experiment happening on the third floor to help them solve an equation.

"They need to learn it now, learn it in context," Chiarella said. "This is really about how they learn."

Architect Benedict Dubbs designed the building around the idea that students learn best in a place they like.

His goal was to give students and staff as many kinds of spaces as possible to keep them engaged and motivated.

"We don't think there's any limit to what this building can do to help them learn," he said.

Reed suggested there is little the building can do, period. He said the strength of the program is obvious from looking at the number of suburban students who have applied.

"May this project begin to break down the artificial barriers that have long segregated and separated southcentral PA," Reed said.

SciTech's fourth floor will house a high-tech business incubator, with the first companies moving in by January, said university President Melvyn D. Schiavelli.