New science building opens its doors

Renovated with new equipment and a modernized internal design, the new Diamond Bar High School science buildings finally finished construction this school year and are now in use.

After roughly three years of construction, the rooms are complete and filled with new equipment to make teaching and learning easier. Each room has been outfitted with new lab and general educational equipment to accommodate students in rigorous classes on campus.

“Some new resources that have come with new buildings would be the new sinks from the biology and chemistry labs as well as the new projectors they have, which are much clearer and easy to read,” senior Sohan Bondada said. “There is also more space in the classrooms to move around and better lighting, and there is a whole other room for labs which is amazing.”

Many students like Bondada said the general environment of the classes has greatly improved compared to last year’s rooms, as they used to have dirty and broken tables and chairs. Additionally, Bondada said that the new rooms were part of his motivation when enrolling in another year of science.

“The new buildings are overall a lot bigger and more spacious. They are also a lot cleaner compared to previous years,” senior Ryan Golonka said. “I honestly didn’t want to take science this year, but I had space in my schedule, and the new buildings were an added bonus.”

In addition to the improvement of having two projectors, the rooms also have bigger whiteboards than last year as well as microphones that teachers can use to project their voice more. Senior Alex Wang noted that having two projectors has fixed problems that are present in other classrooms.

“Having two projectors on both the left and the right side of the room have increased the visibility for students who sit in the back of the room and may be blocked by others in front of them, as they can look to the other side,” Wang said. “While there is still some inconvenience in that they have to look across the room and back to the teacher, at the very least they do get to see what’s on the screen.”

The new individual lab rooms have also added some overall convenience and have improved the quality of lab assignments. However, Wang also did note that other classes may try to hold labs at the same time, meaning that classes have had to schedule lab time around each other.

“The new lab rooms are entirely separate rooms that we go to whenever we have a lab. They’re about as big as the actual classrooms which makes performing labs in physics a lot more convenient,” Wang said.

Overall, the new science buildings have added to the convenience of students, giving them more motivation to take science classes and making their academic experience more enjoyable. Additionally, they have been a great help in making teaching more efficient.

“We have regular desk tables for worksheets and note taking as well as the freedom of moving to the lab tables in case we want to separate the students into smaller groups,” science teacher Kylance Malveaux said. “We are able to move back and forth between the two areas, and it overall makes class more efficient and easy for the students.”