[KHTS] – Hart High School students are busy working on their final projects in the new STEM lab made possible by WiSH and Boston Scientific, school officials said Monday.

Hart’s computer lab was upgraded through a grant from Boston Scientific late last year, said Amy Daniels, the executive director at Wish Education Foundation.

“The grant funds were able to give the computers more hardware upgrades, and more ram,” said Greg Borish, the advanced placement computer science teacher. “We used to money in ways that would give us the most bang for our buck as far as effecting the most amount of kids as possible.”

Two AP computer science classes use the computer lab everyday, as well as the automotive and dance classes who use the room for research, Borish said.

The computer lab is used on a very regular basis, according to Borish.

“This upgrade has affected about 1,000 kids so far,” said Collyn Nielson, Hart High principal.

One of the two AP computer science classes, which is made up of mostly juniors and seniors, were working on their final projects in the lab on Monday morning.

Nielson asked the class what they liked best about the new upgrades.

“They don’t take ten minutes to start up in the morning,” said one student.

“The computers are faster, have fewer crashes and less bugs,” Borish added.

One of the AP computer science students, Ali Finley, was in class Monday working on her final project — creating her own game.

“We had a few options to choose from as far as games,” Finley said. “We could do Minesweeper or Bejeweled.”

Finley, who’s on her way to Berkeley in August, majoring in either electrical engineering or computer science, choose Minesweeper because she felt like she had a better understanding of how it worked.

“I had an issue at one point where when I clicked on a bomb, it wouldn’t reveal spaces that didn’t have anything in them,” Finley said. “It took me about three days to figure it out.”

This is Borish’s sixth year teaching at Hart High, and his third year teaching the AP computer science class.

“I wanted games that were challenging, deeply rewarding but not impossible,” Borish said. “There is also a lot of room for creativity and flare, and that’s one of my favorite things about the project.”

For more information on Boston Scientific, visit their website here.

“They can now spend more time coding,” Borish said. “If they can spend 55 minutes working now, as opposed to the 45 minutes they could before, that’s almost 20 percent more work.”