Posted on: Friday, February 21, 2003

HPU set to expand computer facility

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

Hawai'i Pacific University breaks ground this morning for a $1 million, 50 percent expansion of computer science classrooms in downtown Honolulu in what will become known as The Frear Center.

The state-of-the-art facility will primarily support HPU's Colleges of Professional Studies, Communication and Business Administration.

Instead of classes where professors lecture to students who then retreat to labs to try to apply what they have just been told, the center will combine the lecture hall and lab in a room where the talking teacher will be able to keep his or her computer mouse hovering over the glowing screens of every student, according to professor Gordon Jones.

"Instead of simply lecturing about a system, if I have students in an instructional lab I can switch from my presentation to a mock-up of the system itself so they can test it themselves," Jones said.

The program is as much about education as it is about computers, and could be a model for elementary school teachers giving math or language instruction to their third-graders, he said.

Financed partly with a $600,000 grant from the trust established in 1936 by former Hawai'i Gov. and Chief Justice Walter F. Frear and his wife, Mary, the new center will add three 24-station computer classrooms to the two now serving more than 1,000 HPU students in graduate and undergraduate degree programs in information systems and computer science.

The center will add 4,500 square feet of space to the 8,000-square-foot Media and Technology Center on the mall level of 1132 Bishop St., which will be renamed in honor of the Frears.

Jones said the additional space will give more of the 9,000-member student body access to computers, and can accommodate program enrollment increases of 10 percent to 15 percent a year.

Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.