Located in Silicon Valley, San Mateo Union High School District (SMUHSD) is experiencing dramatic enrollment growth. Founded in 2014 as the District’s seventh high school, Design Tech High School (d.tech) was created to offer an alternative education approach while helping to address the District’s enrollment challenges.

After occupying makeshift facilities for years, the high school now has a specialized building rooted in the school’s experiential learning model and hacker culture. A core thread of the curriculum is a four-year, required Design Lab course that focuses on real-world problems. Responding to this, the new school is centered around an expansive, two-level maker space that functions as the heart of the school. Not only central to the plan, the expansive maker space is also boldly emphasized in the building form highlighting the school’s mission.

With a long sinuous site carved by the Bay’s tidal waters, the building footprint was constrained to an extremely narrow space, averaging less than 80 feet in width. Taking a ribbon-like form, the building embraces the site’s natural contours while making the shoreline part of the interior experience. To maximize the limited space, every square foot of the building is activated as a learning space. Forming the backbone of the school, break-out spaces are woven throughout the plan adjacent to classrooms, project rooms, and labs. Together, this creates a network of learning spaces that are available to each course and student. Aided by movable walls and caster-equipped furnishings, this collection of spaces gives teachers and students the power to choose or create the appropriate setting based on the learning modality: small and large group instruction, small group collaboration, and independent work.

The new building is located on Oracle’s Headquarters—a perfect location for a school focused on solving real-world problems. The connectivity between the school and tech campus creates new learning opportunities, which align with school’s learning-in-action approach. Thanks to the partnership with Oracle, d.tech offers project-based electives where they can learn directly from industry professionals and gain experience with cutting-edge technologies. The flexible learning spaces and specialized labs enable the school’s experiential learning program and curriculum to grow. The unique location also changes the makeup of a school campus. Integrated on a tech campus, the school benefits from sharing facilities with Oracle including the company’s conference center and fitness center along with their workplaces for special electives and internships.