Class: Intermediate, seventh grade

Day 1

Students arrive in the morning at Hood College, host location for the Fort Detrick GEMS program. They meet all resource teachers and near-peer mentors and receive lab safety instructions along with daily schedules.

After the preliminary morning congregation, students go to their appropriate classrooms with their near-peer mentors and begin with an icebreaker. Then, they jump right into the first activity of collecting insects and learning how to use a dichotomous key to identify and classify them.

In the afternoon, students receive an introduction to Newton's laws of motion, as they circulate through different lab stations including activities such as blowing up balloons while changing the angle of air flow; racing cars on different level ramp heights and comparing the distance the cars travel; and performing the "tablecloth trick," in which they test pulling a tablecloth out from under objects of different weights without disturbing them.

Day 2

Students listen to a career speaker in the morning. The Fort Detrick GEMS program provides a variety of career speakers throughout the program. In the past, representatives from the following various agencies have volunteered their time: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Army Center of Environmental Health Research and the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center.

After returning to their classrooms, students extract DNA from the insects they collected the day before. They learn several lab skills, including gram staining, pipette skills, sterile technique and swabbing for bacteria that is grown overnight.

In the afternoon, students begin building custom rockets, keeping in mind the principles they learned from Newton's laws. By the end of the day, they submit their rocket designs to their near-peer mentors.

Day 3

After listening to a second career speaker in the morning, students return to their classrooms and amplify the extracted DNA of the insects using a Polymerase Chain Reaction.

Students continue building their rockets in the afternoon. They paint, install motors and develop team and rocket names. They learn how to determine the apogee, or highest point, of several objects as practice for their calculations during their upcoming rocket launches.

Day 4

Students go straight to their classrooms on the final day. They run the DNA they amplified the day before out on a gel to determine if any of their insects have the Wolbachia bacteria, a common parasite that infects a high proportion of insects. If students do find a positive sample, they get to send the sample to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts to include in the MBL's national study that tracks how the bacteria infects its hosts and where the infection occurs throughout the U.S.

Students also launch their rockets from the courtyard of Hood College and collect data from the launches.

Finally, students participate in a graduation ceremony at which they receive certificates of completion, a guest speaker, a video presentation and an educational stipend of $100 for the week.

At the end of the graduation ceremony, program leaders invite everyone to visit the classrooms and see some of the projects the students work on throughout the week.