Home News Education Austin Stoner, 12, hooks up his surface-supplied air snorkel before helping the rest of his Challenger Learning Center camp team assemble a model of the International Space Station. THE BLADE/ANDY MORRISON Enlarge Loading

Published: 7/23/2012

BY MEL FLANAGAN BLADE STAFF WRITER

Amidst a crowd of spectators, seven team members carefully constructed an international space station in Toledo on Friday afternoon.

The location was an indoor pool on Collingwood Boulevard, and the team members were seven local youths participating in the International Space Station Camp, one of eight summer programs offered by the Challenger Learning Center in Oregon.

The week-long camp taught the children the purpose and history of the International Space Station, as well as how to snorkel. The camp culminated in building a 22-foot-by-50-foot-by-12-foot model of the space station underwater.

"We do this [underwater] because this is the way astronauts train," program coordinator Reed Steele said. "It gives us that feeling of floating in space."

The space station camp is offered annually to area youth who are entering seventh grade or above.

J.T. Langdon, who will be a seventh grader at Toledo School for the Arts, said he has been attending Challenger camps since he was in third grade.

"This is the first year I could be in this one, and I was looking forward to it," J.T. said. "It's fun, and I get to learn stuff over the summer."

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Campers take off for outer space