A year in the making, Lehighton Area High School unveiled its new Science Technology Engineering Mathematics SmartLab on Thursday morning.

With four learning stations set up inside one of the school’s classrooms, the SmartLab is the latest in a series of district STEM initiatives.Instead of a lecture-style learning environment, students can do hands-on work at their own pace in the areas that interest them the most.Topic areas within the SmartLab include alternative and renewable energy, circuitry, computer graphics, digital communications, mechanics and structures, robotics and control technology, scientific data and analysis, and software engineering.Last year, the district started looking at best practices to help its students look beyond the classroom and figure out how they were going to learn the skills needed for them to be successful after they graduate.In stepped Creative Learning Systems with a “one stop shop” for 21st century learning.“All freshmen will take a course in the SmartLab,” Melissa Volcskai, Lehighton’s coordinator of STEAM education, said. “It will replace earth science for them. They will be able to take a few days to see which learning labs they want to focus on and go from there. It will be set up so that they are able to learn at their own pace.”The SmartLab course will not come with a grade at the end of it, only a pass or fail designation. Students will, however, receive credits toward graduation.Lehighton administrators said students are willing to take more risks without an end-of-course grade hanging over them.“We wanted honor students to be able to take the course and not have to worry about falling out of the top 10 percent of their class,” Lehighton Area High School Principal Craig Reichl said. “When you take the grade out of it, everyone is on a level playing field.”After a trip to Washington, D.C., to see a SmartLab in action, Lehighton’s staff knew they had to bring the same opportunities to its students.Funding fell into place with the district providing half of the $175,000 cost and a National Education Foundation grant kicking in the rest.During visits to other schools, Tim Tkach, Lehighton assistant to the superintendent, noticed how important failure was in the eventual success of students in the Learning Labs.“So often students go through and it is success after success, but then when they hit failure, they don’t know how to adapt,” Tkach said. “We went to Nazareth and the kids talked to us about their failure in making a piece of soap because it floated instead of staying down below. But they knew right away they had to change the components or do the design different. That is the learning process.”At least five teachers will be trained to be facilitators in the SmartLab classroom.One of them will be Kevin Kotch.“Technology changes all the time,” Kotch said. “What is good about this lab is it will keep up with the times and allow our students to learn what is new in the technology world. We will give the students the information and then walk around and help them out wherever they need help.”