Students dissect, build, study and play in science trip

They tested their abilities to follow instructions. They designed and built structures to withstand seismic activity. They studied the inner workings of marine life. They looked at sea lion poop.

Over the course of seven days, six students from Stikine Middle School attended the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program (ANSEP) at the University of Alaska Anchorage campus.

ANSEP began in 1995 as a scholarship program but has since become an educational program to help Alaska Natives follow career paths into the fields of science and engineering, starting in elementary school and continuing through college.

According to ANSEP's website, the program's objective is to promote more hiring of Alaska Natives for science and engineering jobs. That includes improving academic outcomes, eliminating the need for costly remedial programs at the university level, and increasing the number of Natives who stay in those academic studies.

Six of Wrangell's middle school students from Laura Davies' seventh and eighth grade class were able to make the trip from April 17 to April 25, immersing in science, technology, engineering and math lessons while making cultural and social connections with students from across the state.

Natalia Ashton, Jackson Carney, Madelyn Davies, Alana Harrison, Mariah Mork and Jackson Pearson made the trip with Davies.

The excitement of the trip began well before the students even got off the ground in Wrangell, however, as they flew on the last flight of Alaska Airlines' Salmon Thirty Salmon jet before it received a new paint job. Students and teacher all received vouchers for a free flight as part of their trip.

In Anchorage, students stayed in the dorms, ate at the university cafeteria and dodged moose.

"We were walking to the computer lab from the commons where we ate our breakfast," said Ashton. "We were pretty behind the other groups. Right when we were about to cross the road, there were two moose on each side of the road. We had to cross pretty quickly, but once we got to the other side, (one of) the moose actually started coming toward us. We had to run to the place (to get away from it)."

The abundance and frequency of moose was the most surprising part for the Wrangell kids. And along with the classroom education, students were schooled in cultural differences.

"We had all these protocols for crossing the street. It's because a lot of the kids come from rural Alaska where there's no street," Madelyn Davies said. "This was an actual skill we had to walk through. It was the blending of cultures."

Some of the kids had never been in a swimming pool, she said. "We went swimming one night, and some of the kids are like, 'Oh, we don't have to dodge logs. We don't have a current.'"

In the classroom, students built a computer, dissected a squid, built a bridge to test for seismic durability, studied sea lion feces to understand their diets and listened to a presentation from Jessica Vos, a crew systems engineer from NASA.

Students had to follow precise instructions on building their computers to achieve the desired outcome: An operational PC that actually turned on when the power button was pushed. The computers will be sent to the students to keep.

For bridge building, the kids not only had to build a bridge from K'nex, a kind of construction modeling toy, they had to make sure it would withstand seismic activity when placed on a "shake table," plus they had to have a specific purpose for the bridge.

"They had to calculate the cost of the bridge. They had to have a team logo. And they had to have a scenario," Laura Davies said. One group designed a bridge connecting the Ketchikan airport to the town, while another focused on connecting Wrangell to the mainland. Yet another created a bridge to help a bobcat cross the river.

Carney's team built the Ketchikan airport bridge, which survived the earthquake, but was eliminated from competition by shrapnel when a piece of another team's structure broke free, flew off and struck their bridge.

"Ours got destroyed by their (Pearson and Davies' team) clips," Carney said. "Their bridge was really flexible. Ours was detailed and strong."

The students also played a lot of basketball, which they had in common with the students from the Kenai Peninsula, Wasilla, Fairbanks and Tok (about halfway between Fairbanks and Canada).

At the end of the trip during a closing ceremony, the students gave slideshow presentations on what they had learned over the seven days.

Funding for the trip came through a combination of $9,000 from Sealaska Corp. and $9,000 from the Indian Education Act, said Wrangell IEA coordinator DaNika Smalley. The funding was enough for six students, however Laura Davies would like to expand that for next year.

"One district had funding to send 24 students, but we only had six. My goal is to find funding for next year so more kids can go," she said. "You can only go once (during middle school)."

ANSEP offers an accelerated three-year high school program, but students need to live and attend classes in Anchorage. All of Davies' students enjoyed their trip and would go again but none expressed interest in moving to Anchorage to attend the high school.