At Berkeley Hall School, the Innovation Lab is a hands-on makerspace built into the regular school day, not an after-school extra. From Primary all the way through Middle School, students use it to explore science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) through real projects rather than worksheets.
In This Guide
Quick Answer for Busy Parents
Berkeley Hall’s Innovation Lab is a makerspace open to every grade, from Primary (K-3rd) through Middle School (6th-8th), built into the regular school day rather than offered as an extracurricular. Younger students start with block-based coding tools, while older students take on CAD design, fabrication, and real-world engineering challenges, including eighth grade’s Shield Elective capstone project.
What Happens Inside the Innovation Lab
Berkeley Hall describes the Innovation Lab as “a versatile makerspace for tinkering and transforming,” a joyful launchpad for design and real-world problem-solving skills. As the school puts it: “We’re growing motivated, persistent makers, kids who see something they don’t know how to do and find a way to figure it out.” That framing matters for how the space actually gets used day to day. Rather than a fixed curriculum every class works through in lockstep, the Lab is built around open-ended problems: a design constraint to work around, a device to program, a broken mechanism to figure out, where the point is developing the persistence to solve it, not memorizing a single correct method.
Coding and Computer Science, Grade by Grade
In Primary grades, students begin with flowcharts and block-based coding tools like Scratch Jr to create animations or program simple robots, building comfort with debugging along the way. Visual coding continues through fifth grade, as students progress to programming for hardware devices and take on more complex projects.
Design, Fabrication, and Real-World Inquiry
Students also work with CAD design tools, adapting their designs to real project constraints, a process that builds spatial awareness and flexible thinking. Elsewhere in the Lab, students explore the history of video gaming by playing and recreating arcade classics, channeling that interest into their own expressive, student-guided projects.
| Grade Band | Focus |
| Primary (K-3rd) | Flowcharts, block-based coding (ScratchJr), early robotics |
| Elementary (4th-5th) | Hardware programming, more complex coding projects, arcade/game history exploration |
| Middle School (6th-8th) | CAD design, fabrication, capstone projects including the Shield Elective |
A School-Day Program, Not an Extracurricular
Unlike Berkeley Hall’s after-school enrichment classes, the Innovation Lab is part of the core curriculum. Students rotate through as part of their regular class schedule, no sign-up or club membership required, which means every student gets hands-on making time built into their week, not just students who opt in.
Berkeley Hall backs this up structurally: Innovation Lab & Technology is one of the school’s dedicated specialist subjects, taught alongside Art, Music, Theater, Library, PE, and Spanish by teachers who focus on nothing else. That’s a meaningfully different commitment than a school that treats a maker space as a once-a-week enrichment add-on rather than a core discipline with its own faculty.
Where the Shield Elective Fits In
The Innovation Lab is also where eighth graders build their Class Shield, the hands-on capstone project every graduating class completes using the Lab’s design software, saws, and laser cutters. It’s a natural extension of everything younger students have already practiced in the space: by the time a student reaches eighth grade, they’ve moved from ScratchJr animations to CAD-designed, laser-cut fabrication, and the Shield Elective is where all of that comes together into one lasting, personal project. For the full story behind that tradition, see our companion article on Berkeley Hall’s Class Shield tradition.
Taken together, the progression says something about how Berkeley Hall thinks about STEAM education generally: not as a single flashy tool like a 3D printer, but as a skill set that compounds year over year, culminating in a project every student can point to and say they built themselves.
Why This Matters for Families Evaluating Berkeley Hall
A dedicated Innovation Lab with its own specialist faculty is a meaningfully different commitment than a single shared cart of laptops or a once-a-semester coding unit. For families comparing Berkeley Hall against other Los Angeles independent schools, it’s a concrete way to evaluate how seriously a school actually invests in hands-on STEAM education, versus simply listing it as a buzzword on an admissions page.
Curious how Berkeley Hall’s academics fit your child? Cardinal Education helps families evaluate whether a hands-on, STEAM-forward school like Berkeley Hall is the right academic fit. Schedule a Consultation now!