The vast majority of the students are in the influential middle school years. The demand for research space at Stone Lab continues to grow. These figures were records for their number of projects and the total of students and scientists, surpassing the previous record in this category by over 20 percent. With the assistance of the Friends of Stone Laboratory, the trend has continued of increasing the number of scholarships and the total amount of money awarded. In spite of these trends, scholarships currently support less than 25 percent of the students attending and cover only 30 percent of the costs for those students.
Further support is needed to meet the ever-growing needs for scholarships.
Renovation of Cooke Castle began in 1998 with the replacement of the roof, dome, and windows. Renovation of porches and stone work will commence in 2000. It is important to bring computer technology to Stone Lab. In 1997, the OSU Research Foundation donated 23 computers, and provided upgrades for ten of those machines in 1998. Four Pentium computers will be added in 1999.