The new law building will include 18 classrooms, a large lecture hall and a state-of-the-art active learning courtroom classroom. It has been lauded as a substantial improvement over the law college’s existing home inside Armstrong Hall on ASU’s Tempe campus, which it has outgrown. The soon-to-be-completed structure is also situated nearby Phoenix’s legal district, and will allow the university to attract more high profile national events, conferences and lecturers.

“The Arizona Center for Law and Society is another wonderful addition to our growing campus in the heart of Phoenix,” said ASU President Michael M. Crow at the official November 2014 groundbreaking ceremony. “Having the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in downtown Phoenix fits perfectly with ASU’s mission of building strong learning and career connections with media, health care, corporate and government organizations for the more than 11,500 students at the downtown campus.”

In addition to the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law spaces, the facility will also include a retail space on the first floor consisting of the bookstore and a café, as well as an underground parking structure. The Ross-Blakely Law Library, currently housed in a separate building on the Tempe campus, will also be moved to the new facility.

Meanwhile, the Arizona Center for Law and Society will include space for two think tanks; multiple centers with cross-disciplinary focus, including the Lincoln Center; and the new ASU Alumni Law Group that will house the first teaching law firm associated with a law school, according to a statement by the university.

“I hope everyone here understands what an incredible achievement this building represents,” said Doug Sylvester, dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said in a speech at the topping out ceremony. “It reflects the fact that you can’t do this alone and that you need community partners to achieve great things. This is an exciting moment for all of us.”

Nearly 80 attendees signed their name to the final 49-foot metal beam, which was then fixed into place by Redwood City, Calif.-headquartered builder DPR Construction, which maintains a regional office in Phoenix. Ennead Architects, with offices in New York and Shanghai, and Jones Studios Inc. of Phoenix each served as lead architects.

Funding for the sprawling new facility — which will serve an estimated 1,000 students upon completion — was partially provided by the city of Phoenix. The city specifically contributed both the land and an additional $12 million in construction bonds to support the development of the Arizona Center for Law and Society. ASU has also embarked on a capital campaign to raise an additional $50 million in donor contributions.

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“The School of Life Sciences wants to build learning environments that go away from the lecture hall environment, where we believe students are passively engaged, and allow students to be actively engaged. If they have better academic content, they can retain it longer instead of forgetting it two seconds after they leave class,” said Kegan Remington, instructional technology analyst at the university.

The classroom, built for the School of Life Sciences, holds 96 students grouped into tables of six, and one 23-inch touch-screen computer is available for every two students. Not only can students create documents in groups in real time, they can share them with the rest of the class using the room’s four projectors. Polling questions, open-ended questions and even drawing questions can be evaluated and used to create discussions throughout the classroom.

“The students love it. All the technology in that room is comparable to what they carry around in their pockets. In other classrooms, they’re lucky if computers are there at all,” Remington said. “The student response has been that [this learning environment] makes them feel more confident going into testing because teachers can isolate misconception on the spot. We thought students would maybe be intimidated by it, but they like it and have matured enough to really think about the way they learn.”

As for the teachers, the university is getting mixed reviews, not because of quality, but because of the new teaching methods required in the interactive classroom “It’s difficult to change the ways someone’s been teaching for 20 to 30 years. [This classroom] takes a different kind of teaching style that involves guiding students instead of just regurgitating content,” Remington said. “We’re starting to create new curriculums, even partnering with companies like Pearson to get students thinking in a more visual way.”

Construction of the facility began in February 2012. Dick & Fritsche Design Group, headquartered in Phoenix, was the architect, and Mesa-based SD Crane Builders served as the general contractor.

The $625,000 classroom was a “pretty in depth construction project,” Remington said. The construction team had to tear apart an old room, which previously was used as a lichen herbarium and stored a large research collection that has since been moved off campus. The room contained algae and mold, as well as had a lot of infrastructure problems that were not updated since the facility was originally built in the 1960s.

The team had to pull out all the electrical and data wiring to prepare for the wireless network points and A/V equipment required to build the room. The new technology also required more bandwidth, so they had to install wired infrastructures in order for every computer and device to have a network connection. “The old classroom only had a couple of electrical outlets, which don’t fly anymore. I can’t even count the number of electrical outlets in the room now,” Remington said.

ASU as a whole has already taken notice of the classroom’s effect on learning, and another classroom like it is in the construction planning phase through the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said Remington. Within the School of Life Sciences, there is already talk of building more, but likely on a smaller scale — for now.

ASU isn’t the only school to approach this kind of learning. In fact, the classroom is modeled after two different kinds: one from the University of Minnesota and one from ASU’s chemistry department that has the same concept of pods, but was built four or five years ago without as up-to-date technology. Although Remington cited these other examples, he believes that ASU is at the forefront of pushing the capabilities of this type of environment by making it more available to students.

Of course, for a school of about 76,000 students, it will be difficult to give everyone access to this type of learning environment, but the university is trying to find ways to give students the best of both worlds by in the future possibly assigning specific weeks for students to be in the more interactive classroom setting. “We’re trying to give access to as many students as humanly possible,” Remington said.

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