Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Northside Middle School students James Roberts (left) and Marcus Fowler watch as they make a robot named S.A.M. pick up a ball using directions given through a computer. Their class allows students to work at their own pace.

Northside Middle School students James Roberts (left) and Marcus Fowler watch as they make a robot named S.A.M. pick up a ball using directions given through a computer. Their class allows students to work at their own pace.

Tech systems teacher Scott Hamilton helps Tanner Miller (middle) and Jessica Simmons with their rocket project during class. Education experts say the kinesthetic class models the concrete-to-abstract learning that is most natural.

James Roberts and Marcus Fowler are hunkered in a small room, using a computer to manipulate a robot arm. The robot is supposed to pick up a small yellow ball and drop it into one hole, then into another. It's harder than it looks.

"Uh oh, phooey. Pick it up," Marcus urged the machine after it dropped the ball.

Elsewhere in Scott Hamilton's lab at Northside Middle School, seventh-grade students, grouped into pairs, are building model rockets, making DNA strands out of beads and calculating the load-bearing capacity of a bridge. In the middle of the room you'll find Hamilton, the teacher of this tech systems class. He's floating about, answering questions and checking students' work.

What you won't see much of are lectures and traditional note-taking that many remember from their middle school math and science classes. Hamilton's class is an example of an attempt in Roanoke County Public Schools, and in schools nationwide, to give students more hands-on learning opportunities.

"The concept is they work with a partner and they kind of learn at their own pace. They're learning about technologies," Hamilton said. "They're eager to come to class and they don't have to take notes and they don't realize how much they're learning."

No one is suggesting that students shouldn't learn how to take notes and shouldn't be expected to sit quietly and listen to lectures or watch demonstrations, school officials say. But the county school system is increasingly trying to balance traditional forms of teaching with a more hands-on form. It can be easier to grasp a difficult scientific concept if you've seen it in action, said Superintendent Lorraine Lange.

"We know that people learn from concrete to abstract," she said. "I don't think it's new at all. It is the right way to teach, but I think what's happened is with the SOLs [Standards of Learning] coming in, everybody wanted to just memorize facts."

County administrators are looking for ways to expand this form of learning, sometimes called "kinesthetic" learning. In elementary schools, for instance, teachers are starting to teach basic algebra concepts in a tangible way. Some students also use Lego kits to make robots.

Roanoke and Montgomery County schools are also bringing robotics to classrooms, reflecting a nationwide interest in robotics, as a way to get students hooked on engineering careers.

In Roanoke, school officials are planning to start a mechatronics class next year -- a combination of mechanical and electronic engineering -- that would incorporate robotics. In Montgomery County, the school system has teamed up with its neighbor, Virginia Tech, to offer a yearlong high school robotics class.

"It's definitely picking up and it's really a terrific hands-on way for kids to get some tangible content," said Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Boards Association, which is including a discussion of robotics classes in its annual conference next year.

"It's also helping teachers in many cases rethink or reshift their teaching style to a problem-based, project-oriented classroom," she said.

Although it's difficult to count how many districts are moving toward these kinesthetic classes, Flynn said she has "watched it slowly pick up."

"One reason robotics is so popular is faculty at engineering schools sort of despair that high school kids, they have no idea what engineering is. They have no concept at all because they don't encounter it," said Dan Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia.

Willingham has studied how people learn and has found that it's not true that some people learn better by listening, others by seeing and others by manipulating something.

"Teachers should use visual and auditory and kinesthetic presentations for different purposes," he said. "What should really drive that is the content of the material."

Hamilton's class at Northside Middle School is a hit with students.

On a recent day, the roughly two dozen students seemed to be so engaged in the class that Hamilton had to remind them several times to wrap things up and log out of the computers as their time was winding down.

"You get to build stuff and you get to do experiments," said Chase Arnold, who said he especially likes building rockets and robots.

"It's really fun," said Kayla Jones. "In my other classes, we just like take notes and write in books and read."