Every year is different for Wrangell High School students in the nationwide Close Up program, and this year had a couple of new high-tech highlights.

Since the 1970s, the program has provided an opportunity for students to visit the nation's capital to learn about history, government, people and places. New York City was added to the itinerary for Wrangell students in 2008.

Five high schoolers the last week of April toured Washington, D.C., including The People's House, which uses interactive displays - lots of big video screens - to show and tell visitors how the White House works and how presidents make decisions.

A high point was when the students sat down at the table with a digital President Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet as they discussed the Confederates' attack on Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War.

Students got to vote on the U.S. response and learn about the real decision, said Sarah Whittlesey-Merritt, who has led the educational excursions for Wrangell since 2007.

The eight-month-old high-tech museum, run by the White House Historical Association, is just a block away from the real thing.

It was one of several stops the students made on their five-day tour of Washington.

Other sites included the Holocaust Museum - a must-see destination for every one of her Close Up groups, Whittlesey-Merritt said - the Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. memorials; along with the Air Force and Marine Corps memorials and a tour of Congress.

It wasn't just serious stuff. The students also made it to a performance of the musical "Sister Act" at Fords Theatre and the National Zoo. "They loved the orangutangs," Whittlesey-Merritt said.

After listening and seeing and studying in the capital city, the students headed to New York. "This year it got shook up a bit," their guide said of the visit to the nation's largest metropolis.

Instead of going to Rockefeller Center to look down from the observation deck 70 stories above street level, the students went to the Edge, a glass-walled viewing platform securely bolted to the sides of a building - 100 stories, or 1,131 feet above Manhattan.

Edge, which juts out from the building 80 feet, seemingly hanging in the air, bills itself as the highest observation deck in the Western Hemisphere.

"It takes a lot of courage to walk out on that Edge thing," Whittlesey-Merritt said.

More down to Earth, the students toured the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the arrival processing point for nearly 12 million immigrants into the United States between 1892 and 1954.

This year's Wrangell Close Up students were Kasey Whitaker, Brody Hommel, Jackson Pearson, Shailyn Nelson and Christina Johnson.

Whitaker and Johnson both said the Lincoln Memorial was their favorite site in Washington; Nelson picked the Iwo Jima Memorial; Hommel said it was Capitol Hill; and Pearson said it was the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

The Edge won the New York City voting with three out of the five.