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Photo by Eric Engman

Photo by Eric Engman

Photo by Eric Engman

With an impressive whirling sound, the large white satellite dish spun around and then pointed straight up into the sky as a group of sixth-graders held their eyes upward in awe.

“It’s hard to compete with the satellite dish,” Laurel Devaney said.

But she is trying to capture their attention with Outdoor Days, an annual event that allows students to sample topics ranging from human relationships with the environment to aquatic ecosystems and fish. Learning about satellites and signals was one of the stations at the event.

At this year’s event, volunteers from the Bureau of Land Management and the University of Alaska Fairbanks manned stations and other groups manned booths to teach students about natural resource management concepts in an outdoor setting. Earthquake survival, telemetry and gold-panning were just three of 17 stations students visited during Outdoor Days.

The three-day event started Tuesday and ends today and Devaney, the event’s coordinator, said each day averages 250 to 270 sixth-graders.

While the task of teaching that many students science in an outdoor setting might seem daunting, Devaney said having three trails with at least five stations each helps break the students into smaller groups.

“We wanted it to be short on lecture and high on hands-on,” Devaney said.

Hands-in was more like it at the archeology station. BLM employee and Outdoor Days volunteer Mike Kunz and a group of students from Nordale Elementary School huddled over an “excavation site” and reviewed their findings. Between the bones and arrowheads, the students learned what those objects could tell archeologists about the civilizations that lived there before.

Not every student wanted to get their hands in at Melissa Sikes’ aquatic insects station. Even before Sikes, program director for Friends of Creamer’s Field, let the Weller students take to the pond to find their own bugs, the girls in the group hung back and made faces when Sikes demonstrated how to find live bugs in the nets with her hands.

“I don’t mind the bugs; it’s the muck,” Justine Johnson said as she daintily picked at her net.

Even if the station didn’t inspire a career path declaration, all the students had to do was wait 30 minutes before switching stations and topics.

Started in 1991 by the BLM as part of “Outdoors Week,” waning interest prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to become the primary sponsor of the event in 2001.

“It’s to connect kids with science, a sampler of science careers and getting kids excited about the outdoors,” Devaney said.