Case Studies
Cardinal Newman Catholic School, Hove, East
Sussex
Chris Depper, technical manager at Cardinal Newman Catholic School,
wanted to create an ICT suite in an existing classroom. He needed to
accomodate up to 23 students in the room with 17 of them on PCs.
We attended and carried-out a thorough site-survey. The room had 5
windows, a double-cupboard, a smartboard and radiators to consider. The
building was about 10 yeard old and characterised by exposed brickwork
and exposed roof timbers.
Our first task was to draw the room on CAD, detailing every element of
the room to the nearest millimetre in 3D. This would allow us to design
our ICT suite to precisely fit the room.
To help the teacher monitor what students were doing, we designed the
layout so that she could stand in the middle of the room and see every
student's computer screen. To aid concentration when demonstrating at
the smartboard, students would have to to turn away from their screen
towards the front of the class.
We specified white melamine-faced chipboard desktops with a large radius
bull-nosed edge for wrist comfort. Melamine is an extremely durable
material able to withstand even the most unsympathetic treatment, and
pen-marks can be removed with conventional cleaning products.
Professionally mitred invisible joints
To follow the strong wood theme of the building, we specified 50x50
wooden legs with a mahogany stain to match other woodwork in the room.
The legs were set to allow 17 student positions without interference.
Although the legs were fixed to the floor and desktop, they could be
re-positioned at a later date if the number of students changed.
We allowed sufficient space in the centre of the room for free-standing
tables and chairs.
The large number of windows and radiators posed a challenge for
distributing power and data. We did not want to have a large number of
ugly vertical drops to circumvent the windows, but likewise, we did not
want to create complex trunking shapes to step past the radiators. We
resolved this by specifiying a continuous strip of MDF faced with white
high-pressure laminate and edge-banded with a strip of wood, stained in
mahogany to match the legs. We fitted tunking to this to create an
unbroken power and data rail above the desktops.
We installed the ICT suite over a two-week period, starting with the
furniture construction. Our carpenter fitted the worktops to ensure that
the mitred joints were invisible, and the tops were tight to the wall.
We supplied an additional patch-panel for the nework cabinet which was
in an adjacent lobby, and ran all the network cabling through the
loft-space to ensure they remained invisble. We also ran some spare
network cables to make future expansion easier.
We fitted RCDs for electrical safety, and to prevent students
accidentally pressing the emergency 'off' button which would cause
considerable disruption to students' work, we mounted these at ceiling
height.
Once the electrical and network testing was complete, we moved all the
PCs from an existing classroom to the new suite, positioning and cabling
them ready for the school's ICT team to configure them.