MUNCIE, Ind. – Students taking laboratory classes in Cooper Life Science Building and Cooper Physical Science Building at Ball State University soon will be in new wireless laboratories with improved safety features.

The renovation of 28 to 30 laboratories within the Cooper Science Building will increase student safety and enhance learning, according to chemistry department Chair Lynn Sousa.

"We are making the labs safer and state-of-the-art by reconfiguring the workstations and adding wireless laptop computers to each workstation," Sousa said. "There is an excitement generated by this project in the department that encourages faculty and students to try new things."

Physical chemistry labs will be arranged so experiment stations will be located around the room. Students will feed data from each experiment into computers in the middle of the room, allowing them to work on experiments as a team.

"Using computers in the labs will allow students to do more complex experiments and will be more like what they will encounter in work environments," Sousa said. "Having the computers in the rooms also raises the quality of the experiments."

The addition of wireless classrooms like this has resulted in Ball State being named among the top 20 wired U.S. universities by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine.

The renovated labs will include the installation of new fume hoods with improved exhaust capabilities. They also will protect students from being splashed by chemical reactions during experiments.

The lab workstations are being reorganized to make it easier for lab supervisors to monitor each student and for students to get out of the labs if a problem would occur.

Renovation also will improve learning among students by making it easier for students to communicate with and learn from each other, Sousa said. Projection systems are being incorporated into labs so students will see additional materials related to the experiment they are doing on the screen.

Each pair of students in the renovated chemistry labs will have a wireless laptop computer at their workstation that will allow them to make predictions, do the experiment, measure the results and compare the predictions with those results on the computer.

Work already has begun on three labs in the chemistry department, and the renovation of four more is scheduled to be completed by August 2001, said Jim Lowe, facilities planning and management engineer.

Other departments benefiting from the renovations are physics and astronomy, physiology and health science, biology and geography. Total cost of the project is $5.3 million.

By Kortney Reinitz, Graduate Assistant

(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information, contact Sousa by phone (765) 285-8060 or e-mail at lrsousa@bsu.edu.)