SOUTH PORTLAND – When Amber Ahmady entered the eighth grade this year at South Portland’s Memorial Middle School, she had her sights set on becoming a surgeon. But after a few class hours spent with a soldering iron and a drill, she’s considering a different career choice.

“I really think I’m going to be an engineer,” she said on Thursday, while putting the finishing touches on a SeaPearch submarine unit in her STEM inquiry and design class. “I’ve discovered that I really like building things.”

STEM – an acronym for science, technology, engineering and math – is both a renewed focus on 21st-century job skills and a project-based system of study that stresses learning through doing. Using a three-year, $150,000 grant from Texas Instruments, South Portland has this year launched a series of classes in which middle-school students are putting their skills to the test to solve various engineering problems.

In the sixth grade, students are working to build a better lobster trap. In Ahmady’s class, the project is to build an underwater robot using kits created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with sponsorship from the Office of Naval Research, the educational arm of the U.S. Navy.

All of the students will be demonstrating their projects during “From Store to Shore,” a special event planned for April 14-22 at the Maine Mall. Shoppers will get a first-hand look at how the class uses real-life applications to show students the value of science education.

“It’s aimed at being an all-in-one teaching tool for pre-engineering,” explained Wendy West, a program coordinator at the Compass Project in Portland. While Compass has worked the past two years to build sail boats with South Portland alternative education students, West has spent every school day this semester working with students at the city’s two middle schools on the SeaPerch program. She leads them through the mathematics of design and construction, the physics of buoyancy and the engineering needed to build waterproof electric motors.

“Basically, it’s a submarine,” West said, while holding one of the very un-submarine looking PVC-tube frames students will eventually pilot through an underwater obstacle course. “Everything in it is designed to support STEM programming.”

“The SeaPerch submarine challenge is very hands-on,” said Chris Hughes, a longtime South Portland science teacher who took on the STEM pilot class this year. “In the traditional classroom, students are almost taught to fear failure, but here it’s OK. As much as anything else, the students are learning the scientific method, working through the process of taking a problem and finding a solution.

“In a regular science class, kids go into the lab with a foregone conclusion of what they’re supposed to get and, if they don’t get it, it’s like, sorry, we’d don’t have time to do it again but here’s what you should have seen,” Hughes said. “But here, we allow the kids to do it and to fail at it, and then learn from that and improve their ideas and designs. It’s all about critical thinking, which is why, with a lot of our projects, there’s no right answer.”

For students like Aaron Radziacz, part of the fun is getting to use power tools in class.

“To do this, we’ve been using a lot of things like drills and vices, soldering irons,” he said, pointing to the mounting holes where his engine will eventually go. “It’s nice that we don’t have to sit in a chair and watch somebody do it. We can actually be first-hand and learn to do it for ourselves.”

According to Superintendent Suzanne Godin, building an interest in building goes far beyond the classroom. It’s a matter of dire national importance. Only about 5 percent of all American high school graduates are bound for careers in engineering. In China, the number is closer to 50 percent.

“Economic development in Maine depends upon having STEM-literate workers,” Godin said. “Today’s middle-school students, a decade from now, will find that 1 in 7 new Maine jobs will involve STEM disciplines, and these jobs will produce wages that are 58 percent higher than wages for other jobs.”

Ahmady isn’t too concerned with that at this stage in her career. All she knows is the satisfaction she felt the first time she picked up a soldering iron.

“This is way better than social studies, which is about the most boring class in the whole world,” she said. “Right now we’re doing American history and, I know that’s important, but instead of being told what other people did, in here we’re doing things for ourselves.”

And while conventional wisdom may claim that boys benefit most from active learning, Ahmady said she does better in the project-based program.

“I can remember things we did in here at the beginning of the year,” she said. “But, to be honest, in social studies, I can’t even really remember what we did two weeks ago.”

Godin said the classes have proven popular enough that there’s actually been measurable impact on attendance. The Texas Instruments grant will be used to train even more teachers in the process for next year, with planning beginning now on future efforts.

“We absolutely believe STEM programming and project-based learning will continue after the TI grant, because it’s necessary to support student achievement and to support the futures our students will have before them,” she said. “Students must be engaged in their learning and it is critical to provide real world learning opportunities that encourage students to explore STEM-related fields and careers.”

While Texas Instruments money helped pay for the teacher training and curriculum preparation, the MIT SeaPerch kits were purchased using a $1,000 donation from the South Portland-Cape Elizabeth Rotary Club.

The community involvement will continue next week, West said, when students give their machines a public demonstration during the first “From Store to Shore” event at the Maine Mall.

During a week-long ecology event leading into Earth Day, students will demonstrate their work for the public, piloting their submarines in large tanks and explaining their work Monday through Saturday at 10 a.m., 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., and Sunday at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.

“Studies show that one way to really cement learning is to teach it,” Hughes said.

Are the students nervous about explaining their project work to the public, or that their submarines might fail to perform as expected? Not really, said Radziacz. After all, the main job of a submarine is to go under water.

“I’m pretty sure mine will sink,” he joked.

Framed by his team’s SeaPerch submarine, Shamir Anzures, a student at Memorial Middle School in South Portland, seals a propeller motor inside its waterproof housing. The students will demonstrate their submarines at an upcoming event at the Maine Mall.