On a hot summer day like this, you would expect to find a lot of young people at the hawaiian waters adventure park. But one group of youngsters never got in more than knee deep.

These ninth graders from Farrington, Nanakuli and Waianae high schools are involved in the U.H. Gear-up Academy. Today, they're competing with the sea perch underwater robots they built. This activity is conducted by Kapiolani Community College's stem program.

"I think for some of these kids that they have never really had the opportunity to play around with any kind of technology. And they learn some really fundamental principles in physics and engineering that they probably wouldn't ordinarily learn. Things like bouyancy," said Dr. John Rand, a teacher in the program.

"Professor rand said he taught you guys about bouyancy." Michael onaia - "oh, yeah to make it float lidat. From the air from the floaters and the pipes of the sea perch," said Michael Onaia, a Farrington High School freshman.
stem stands for science, technology engineering and math...But the students learn other things as well.

"They're learning to support each other. They're learning what they're good at and what maybe they're not so good at, what they need to rely on others for. And what they rely on themselves for. And I think that's great. You can't teach that kind of stuff in a standard lecture classroom," said Rand.

Hands on experience includes working with the sea perch.

"This is a sea perch and it goes underwater and it's connected with wires so that with the remote you can control with the propellers the way it goes," said another freshman from Farrington High School, Jessica Fernandez.

Jessica represents the 21st century young women.

"Getting girls involved we're adding a huge pool to an area that traditionally doesn't go into stem and I think by starting kids early and doing projects like this, we start to get kids that otherwise wouldn't normally be part of this kind of a stem program," said Dr Rand.

So is it working? Let jessica answer that.

"Today will be fun because everybody here is happy because you get to test out all these things and we made it ourselves."