Software Engineering faculty and students celebrate newly renovated ‘Classroom of the Future’

Students, faculty, staff, and external partners gathered in the newly renovated GOL-1550 lab on Monday, November 10th to formally celebrate the ‘Classroom of the Future.’ This project, which was started three years ago by RIT’s department of software engineering, was completed in August, just in time to be used for the 2025-2026 academic year. The finished room challenges the traditional classroom layout of rows of tables facing a central board or screen. Instead, it features eight rectangular tables, each outfitted with a large monitor that can be raised and lowered at the push of a button, and whiteboards along the majority of its walls. Altogether, these features allow for more collaboration and experiential learning amongst students.

“When you have one large screen projector at the front (of the classroom), you're limited by how much text you can present,” Dr. Daqing Hou, professor and chair in the department of software engineering comments. “If you make the font too small, it's impossible to read . For coding you sometimes need to present a lot of code, a dense amount. These table monitors help students to see the details and allow presenters to display more information.”

The Classroom of the Future" was made possible by gifts from Palmers Family of Companies and Corning. A committee of faculty and college leadership was then formed to identify what features would be needed to support a modern "Classroom of the Future."

Construction officially started at the end of the 2024-2025 academic year and lasted through the summer term. In addition to the aforementioned upgrades, the renovations also allowed the department to alter the wall separating GOL-1550 from the neighboring software engineering teamspace. The updated wall was outfitted with large glass windows to allow more coordination between the professors and student teams in each class.

The celebration commenced with a welcome from dean Matt Huenerfauth and remarks from associate dean for faculty affairs and industry engagement, Naveen Sharma. Attendees included Kip Palmer, President of Palmer Family of Companies, and Drew Saur, Palmer’s CIO. Chris Wake, lecturer in the department of software engineering, followed up the opening remarks with a demonstration of the room’s IT infrastructure. Software engineering faculty members Yiming Tang, Christopher Wake, Dmitry Lukyaniv, and students Joshua Rubin-Garcia and Rafael Gilba then spoke about their experiences in the classroom, what new features they’ve found beneficial, and what they believe could be improved upon. A reception capped off the celebration.