At the Moore Auditorium at the Schoodic Education and Research Center on Mount Desert Island, the buzz of several dozen middle school and high school students at work with magic markers and large posters might have convinced one that the Maine school year lasts until August.

From July 13 to 17, 47 students from Washington Academy, Islesboro Central School, and the Searsport, Greely, Deer Isle-Stonington, and Camden Hills high schools were, in the middle of their summer vacations, taking part in the decidedly scholastic Community for Rural Education, Stewardship and Technology (CREST) Summer Institute program.

Operated by the Island Institute (which publishes Working Waterfront), CREST’s Summer Institute gives 16 coastal and island schools access to state-of-the-art technologies in a camp-style environment. CREST is a five-year program that provides 55 teachers and 110 students from Maine’s island and remote coastal communities with intensive training in technology and career path development.

CREST focuses on delivering database development, Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping, web design and ethnographic research skills in an interdisciplinary approach that reconnects students to their communities and provides insight into applicable science and technology careers through local service-learning projects.

The program’s place-based education philosophy empowers students and teachers to design technical projects to address issues affecting their specific communities. This was CREST’s second weeklong summer session, and the fourth year of summer institutes. 

Four students talked about the program’s impact on their education and their communities during the recent July session: Forest Putnam, 16, and Dashiell Marley, 15, from Islesboro Central School; Alec Eaton, 13, from Deer Isle-Stonington High School; and Gus DenDanto, 13, from Tremont Consolidated School.

Marley, who was focusing on CREST’s Geographic Information System (GIS) program, said that he was impressed with the instruction he is receiving and the opportunity to work with top-quality software.

“I’ve always liked maps, and I’ve done HTML and Web-design work,” Marley said. At CREST, “we’re able to use GPS data to create reference points on a map that is sent to and downloadable from the Internet. It’s quite useful-you can make advanced, digital maps.”

Putnam said that this is his second summer session with CREST, where he is learning sophisticated computer code in the summer institute’s Web-design section. “I’m in Intermediate Webs. I’m learning how to use Java Script and other HTML codes to make web pages,” he said.

CREST Summer Institute students each choose a technology specialty-digital mapping, web-design, or digital storytelling-for their community-oriented projects. All students also take part in leadership development activities.

These leadership development activities-whether cooperating to get across the Schoodic center’s ball field while only using Hula-hoops as stepping stones, for instance, or designing games in small groups to teach to others-were especially motivating for the four students.

“I’ve been really excited about the student leadership program and the group challenges,” DenDanto said. “We get together and do challenges and teach each other about them … It’s based on people being leaders and followers and seeing which position you are more comfortable in.”

Putnam added, “We did this geo-hunt with GPS [units] and a series of latitude and longitude coordinates and we had from one to the next and figure out the clues and keep on going.”

All of CREST’s recreational and technical initiatives follow a dynamic teaching model in which students and teachers interchange their roles. Indeed, leadership development activities organized in the Moore Auditorium often proceed after a digital slide show that ends with the words “Teach the Teachers” projected onto lecture hall wall.

CREST “is just as much about teaching the kids and teaching the teachers,” Marley said.

Next year there will likely be a shortened summer institute to celebrate the accomplishments of all the schools over the past five years. But the CREST program continues, in that all of the participating teachers have integrated CREST technologies and teaching methods into their classroom curriculum.

This effort to broadly engage the students in technical, social, and administrative functions made for a spirited conversation among Putnam, Marley, Eaton, and DenDanto. They all said that CREST has allowed them to experiment with equipment and skills that would not have otherwise been available to them.

“This program is about learning new technology, but also taking that technology and new leadership skills back into the community,” DenDanto said. He began exploring GIS with CREST precisely because his school did not have access to the software. “My school didn’t offer any of these types of programs…We’ve never done any of this kind of learning.”  After this summer, his teachers now have the training and access to technology to be able to use this in his classrooms.

Marley added that he would never have been able to use the GIS programs like those at CREST or learn as much as he has about Google Earth, a downloadable program that allows users to manipulate comprehensive images of the world.

Puntam explained that CREST has allowed the Islesboro Central School to acquire new and needed computers and other hardware systems. “All of our GPS [units] and one or two of our laptops are from CREST. Our video camera as well,” he said.

All four students plan to return to future CREST events, if they can, and have studious plans for their educations. Putnam and Eaton are looking at naval and electrical engineering, respectively.” Marley looks forward to a career in science or diplomacy, and DenDanto is thinking about economics. There is one problem with the summer institute: “We eat breakfast too early,” Eaton said. “Seven o’clock is not cool.”

CREST is funded by the National Science Foundation. 

Micah Conkling is participating in the Working Waterfront’s summer student writing program and is the son of Island Institute president, Philip Conkling.