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Tasmania lies more than 8,000 miles on the other side of the globe, but for students taking Allan Miller's science class and Cyndi Romberg's language arts class at Kenai Middle School, those 8,000 miles won't seem like a lot.

"Not many kids have the chance to do this," said Fletcher Iverson, a student at Kenai Middle School. "We're one of the 12 (schools)."

Kenai Middle School will be linked with a middle school class in Woodbridge, a small village close to the Tasmanian capital of Hobart. The students will work together via the Internet to put together an illustrated mystery story based on the research they do on the Arctic and Antarctic environments. The story will be fictitious, said Miller, the project coordinator, but the science will be real.

Kenai Middle School is one of 12 schools in Alaska that will collaborate with schools in Tasmania. Stemming from a National Science Foundation project known as International Polar Year, a two-year project involving 67 countries, Ice e-Mysteries is designed to raise student interest in science while teaching them cultural understanding, as well as incorporating reading, writing, art and technology.

"I see seven tables with groups of four to five students coming up with an idea and building on the idea both scientifically and writing," Miller said. "One of the first things we're doing is student-choice research."

Miller says the science will be accurate, but first the students must come up with the thing they want to research. This could be anything from global climate change to permafrost, but Miller said he and Romberg must be careful that the project doesn't become the teachers' own agenda.

Romberg said her job is to help students explore the mystery genre and take the science they learn and incorporate it into a mystery story. Students also may want to specialize as the story evolves, one focusing on the art component of the story, another focusing on the science aspect and so on.

"They're all going to do what they want and enjoy the most," she said.

Ice e-Mysteries is a way to get students involved in research as a way of learning science in school, said Dr. Elena Sparrow, the project's principal investigator. Sparrow, who is the educational outreach director for the University of Alaska Fairbanks' International Arctic Research Center, said such research could include using a frost tube to determine when freezing in the soil occurs, or recording the time freezeup occurs in the fall and compare it to when breakup occurs in the spring.

Students could monitor when and how fast green-up occurs by measuring leaf length and monitoring trees to see when buds start growing.

"Students who move onto another class can do their own research," Sparrow said.

While Kenai Middle School students work with their Tasmanian counterparts, project evaluator Dr. Andy Page will study the educational process. This includes finding out, from a student's perspective, what they learned, what the teachers learned, what barriers stood in the way and what were their reflections on the project. Page, a faculty member with the University of Alaska Anchorage's Department of Teaching and Learning, said he will try to develop a model for cross-hemispheric collaboration that will focus on the use of Web-based tools in the classroom.

"Some of the students are already savvy with these social networking sites and blogs," he said. "They (are) moving philosophically from 'I think therefore I am' to more of a 'we participate as a group therefore we are.'"

Even though the current project has students collaborating with English-speaking students in another first-world country, Page said projects like Ice e-Mysteries could eventually be done between children in Alaska and children in Ecuador or the Middle East.

"What about going to a country where we have the language challenge?" he said. "There's blogs out there and people from all over the world can post on a blog, but here, they're not only doing that, they're building these books, these e-books, an actual artifact, a digital artifact, that will be evidence of their learning."

For Miller and Romberg's students, however, the project is just beginning. Last Tuesday, University of Alaska Fairbanks Associate Professor Kenji Yoshikawa visited their classroom to talk to them about permafrost, something that's found all over the world, even near the equator, and on other planets in the solar system.

"It's a rare opportunity to talk to a world leader in anything," Miller told his students. "It's like meeting an Olympic athlete."

Yoshikawa showed the students evidence of permafrost on Mars and compared it with the permafrost found near Kotzebue. Later Yoshikawa, the students and their teachers trooped out to the back of the school where their permafrost monitoring station was set up.

"(This project helps) expand our horizons," said student Austin Daly. "You're not stuck in your same environment. You have a head start if you want to be a scientist."

Jessica Cejnar can be reached at jessica.cejnar@peninsulaclarion.com.