Case Study | Education

Limitless learning: a multi-school co-ed college on embracing tech for the future

More and more schools are embracing the technology trend of adopting a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program to make education more interactive, fun and engaging. Trinity College is no exception.

With smart technology at their disposal, the school’s 3,950 students can connect, collaborate and engage with their passions. It is also helping bridge the gap between learning in the classroom and at home.

Creating a learning and teaching environment of the future

While most of its senior students are using portable devices in the classroom, Trinity College acknowledges there is still a need for desktop machines to support resource-intensive applications, such as Adobe Creative Suite and AutoCAD, which not all student-owned laptops are powerful enough to do.

Trinity College currently operates eight computer labs across its five schools. Each lab has 30 Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny-in-One (TIO) PCs featuring 12th Gen Intel Core processors for students, plus another dedicated machine for the teacher. These PCs, accessed mainly by junior and middle school students and make up part of the school’s 2,000 network of devices, are used for virtual reality game development, animation creation, and rendering 3D objects.

Trinity College also has an innovation centre equipped with Lenovo ThinkStation P360 workstations powered by 12th Gen Intel Core processors and features 32GB RAM for students to carry out dedicated virtual reality work.

Apart from being able to support the school’s application usage, the other appeal about the Lenovo ThinkStation P360 workstations has been its compact, space-saving design. The machine is designed in a way that its ports and slots sit behind the monitor, making them more difficult to be accessed by students and ultimately, more durable.

“The Trinity Innovation and Creativity school represents what we imagine 21st century learning can look like. Those challenges, those obstacles, such as limited accessibility and low-powered machines have disappeared. What we are now doing is putting into the hands of the students the best quality equipment that we could possibly imagine, so that their skillset, mindset, and toolset are unmatched,” according to Trinity College teacher Steve Grant

But it’s not only students who have benefited from these powerful machines. Staff who conduct specific work using Adobe Creative Suite or AutoCAD also have access to a network of ThinkStation P360 workstations. Alongside this, staff are equipped with Lenovo ThinkPad X1 laptops powered by 11th Gen Intel Core Processor and ThinkPad L13 laptops featuring 11th Gen Intel Core Processor and 16GB RAM, which has encouraged them to use more applications in the classroom.

“We’ve noticed that staff are more productive than when they were using desktops. Moving from classroom to classroom is now easier when they have their own device and a great teaching asset.”
said Andrew Larner, ICT Director, Trinity College

Finding the right technology partner with the best tools for the job

To help identify what machines were going to be the most suitable for the school, Trinity College surveyed nearby schools and their staff to find out what they were using, what products they had in the past and what was the technical support like. It was a no-brainer when Lenovo consistently topped the list.

Serviceability and durability were also feature priorities for Trinity College as it found other products in the past had let it down in both areas.

“We have found that we can get parts for the machines quickly and get them fixed quite easily, whereas other devices we had in the past took us a long time to get parts and we were always out hundreds of devices at any one time waiting for them to be repaired. Lenovo support technicians will also come out every couple of weeks, which is fantastic.”
said Andrew Larner, ICT Director, Trinity College

Trinity College’s vision of helping its student “discover a world of opportunity” is now being enabled by smart technology every day.