Facilities

The School of Computer Science is based in the Jack Cole and John Honey buildings on the North Haugh in St Andrews. The School is regularly updating these buildings with new labs and new teaching spaces. The Jack Cole building provides office space for all academic staff, teaching rooms and student computing labs. Next door, the John Honey building houses further computing labs and teaching space.

Students have 24-hour access to both buildings.

Computing labs

Student computing labs are arranged to support collaborative working while also providing private spaces for individual work. The labs contain group-working and social areas with large LCD screens. 

While the School's computing labs are well equipped with powerful and up-to-date PC workstations, there are also desks where personal laptops can be used with a monitor. Each lab desk has access to a power socket for charging personal devices.

Most lab workstations have dual LCD screens and a number are equipped with hardware to support GPU-accelerated machine learning computation.

Multi-function printers are available across both School buildings and the wider campus.

The School provides a number of network services for students and staff such as file storage, web publishing, SSH hosts and version control systems. 

Lecture and tutorial venues

The School uses variety of lecture venues across the University campus. Some lectures take place in a room equipped with workstations to allow lecturing to be interspersed with practical exercises. Other lectures are delivered in larger, more traditional lecture theatres in neighbouring buildings or in modern small-group meeting rooms for more specialised Honours modules.

Social space

Students are encouraged to interact socially, since this provides an opportunity to discuss material informally among peers and forms a valuable part of the learning process. Often, this takes place in computing labs or the coffee and lunch area in the Jack Cole building which provides a comfortable place to take a break away from a computer screen. 

Drinks and snacks are available from vending machines. The School provides tea and coffee-making facilities and microwave ovens for heating food. The bean-to-cup coffee machine in Jack Cole is a particular favourite of many students.