Computer Lab Design for Schools

If you take one thing from this page, take this. Computer lab tables are commonly offered in 1000 mm and 1200 mm two-seat widths, the 1200 mm looks more generous, and it is frequently what ends up in the specification because nobody has drawn the room.

In a 25 by 30 foot lab, 1000 mm tables allow 30 machines: twenty positions around the perimeter and ten in a back-to-back central island, with a clear aisle of about 1.1 metres throughout. The same room with 1200 mm tables takes about 23 machines. Seven workstations - close to a quarter of the lab - vanish in exchange for 200 mm of extra table width per position that a school desktop and a 21.5 inch monitor do not need.

At an indicative Rs. 64,000 per machine of IT hardware alone, those seven positions are more than Rs. 4.5 lakh of lost capacity, and the school discovers it only when the furniture is already made. Draw the layout against the actual table dimension before the furniture is ordered. Every table specification we issue names the width because of exactly this.

The depth matters too, for a different reason. Six hundred millimetres is the practical minimum that puts a 21.5 inch monitor at a sensible viewing distance once the keyboard tray is in use. Shallower tables force the monitor too close, which is an eye-strain complaint you will hear about within a term. Full dimensions and construction are on the computer lab furniture page.

Power and backup. Each machine gets one switched 6 A socket fed from the UPS output board, with a surge-protected strip at the desk carrying the machine and the monitor. Air conditioners, the printer and the UPS input take 16 A points on raw power - putting the printer on the UPS is a common and expensive mistake, because a laser fuser draws a large intermittent load that the UPS has to be sized for and that nothing needs backed up. Thirty-one machines is a design load of around 5 kW, which a 6 kVA online double-conversion UPS carries at about 65 percent loading with roughly 30 minutes of battery. Online, not line-interactive: a room full of switching power supplies deserves a clean regenerated waveform, and one central unit is maintained where thirty small ones are not.

Protection and earthing. The lab needs its own distribution board with miniature circuit breakers, a residual current device and a Type 2 surge protector, plus a changeover for UPS bypass so the lab can run while the UPS is serviced. Earthing should be specified as a performance requirement - two pipe electrodes bonded to a combined resistance of one ohm or less - rather than as a count of electrodes, because the count proves nothing.

Lighting. Three hundred lux at desk level, from recessed 600 x 600 mm LED panels in the false ceiling, laid out so the panels are not directly reflected in the screens. Twelve panels of 36 W covers about 70 square metres. The three quality numbers that matter are efficacy above 120 lumens per watt, colour rendering above 80 and a unified glare rating below 19. Add a batten over the whiteboard so it is lit when the panels are dimmed, emergency luminaires with an hour of battery, and illuminated exit signage. Sunscreen roller blinds of 3 to 5 percent openness on the windows control daylight glare without making the room a cave.

Cooling and ventilation. Around four tons of refrigeration for a 70 square metre, 31-machine, 62-person room, delivered as two 2.0 ton five-star inverter splits with voltage stabilisers. Ceiling fans for air movement and two 300 mm exhaust fans to clear the room between batches. Heat is the enemy of both concentration and machine life.

Data. Thirty-six Cat6 drops for 31 machines - the extras serve the printer, two ceiling access points and two spares - run in GI tray with casing-capping drops, labelled, and certified with a permanent-link test pass for every outlet. Not Cat6A: the longest run in a single room is well under 30 metres and a school lab will not use 10 gigabit. Terminate into two 24-port patch panels in a lockable 12U wall rack with a managed 48-port switch, a UTM appliance for web filtering and application control, and the student network on its own VLAN, isolated from the school's administrative network. CBSE has required content filtering and safe internet practice in school labs since its 2017 circular, and this is what satisfying it actually looks like in hardware.

Software. A lab management tool so the teacher can see, lock and control student screens - Veyon is open source and does the job without licence cost. Centrally managed endpoint security across all the machines. And a locked-down configuration: USB policy, browser policy, and a standard image that can be re-applied in an afternoon when a machine is inevitably broken.