Students at Sacred Heart Catholic High School in Walkerton will now be better equipped for technology and the workforce.
The high school officially unveiled its new Innovation and Manufacturing Centre on Tuesday.
A $1.8-million facelift includes three adjoining rooms focusing on high tech manufacturing, arts, and a creative space to bring students' ideas to fruition.
The centre gives students the chance to work across different disciplines in a customized space focused on creativity and learning.
"It gives safe places for kids to experiment, ask questions, make a mess, learn from it and build and create and so really, not a lot of our schools have that large creative space to do that in and so this is a step towards that," says Jamie McKinnon, Director of Education for the Bruce-Grey Catholic District School Board.
Students will now be better prepared with the necessary skills to move forward in their chosen post-secondary endeavours thanks to this new hub of creative and technological learning; a hub that includes top of the line computers (both Windows and MAC) and high tech state-of-the-art machinery and manufacturing processes like welding, a plasma cutter, CNC tool and die machine, drill presses and more.
"We wanted to bring in 21st Century learning and the whole notion of working in teams and those sorts of things and that really was the driving force for, particularly, our innovation centre," says Glen Miller, principal at Sacred Heart High School.
The new Manufacturing and Innovation Centre also gives students chances that they haven't had before, according to one of the school's art teachers.
"They're collaborating, they're researching, they're drawing it out and then they're making it happen." says art teacher Samantha George-Easton. "They can use the 3D printers to print out their stuff, they can use the CNC machine or the plasma machine in order to carve it out, they can construct, they can get messy."