See travel photos and read blog entries written by Mound Westonka students about their experience in Costa Rica at www.getjealous.com/westonkacostarica
.
Watch a six-minute video about the trip at www.youtube.com. Search for Westonka Costa Rica.
To learn more about Finca La Anita, the eco-lodge where the students stayed, visit www.fincalaanita.org.
By Kelly Westhoff
When school resumes next week, eight Mound Westonka High School students will have a really good story to tell about what they did over summer vacation.
They spent 10 days in Costa Rica wading through a tropical rain forest and digging up ant fungus.
The students worked with Adrian Pinto, a scientist and researcher with the University of Costa Rica, who is studying leaf cutter ants.
The ants are a menace for Costa Rican farmers. Pinto is trying to identify and develop a naturally occurring bacteria that could help farmers destroy leaf cutter ant colonies without the use of toxic chemicals.
Doing so, however, requires lots of close up contact with leaf cutter ants. That's where the fungus comes in.
Leaf cutter ants trim off pieces of leaves with their scissor-like teeth, carry those leaves into their underground colonies and use them to line their homes.
Once the leaf pieces are in place, the ants secrete a chemical on the leaves, causing them to grow a fungus that the queen then lives among.
"It was amazing to see how these tiny ants constructed these giant underground chamber systems and grew this fungus," said Ashley Garvais, a Mound Westonka student who traveled with the group. She will be a junior this fall.
"It was really cool to be out in the field and doing hands-on research," she said.
"In a classroom, you just have a textbook and you read from it, but being in Costa Rica was real life. We got to actually see what was happening," Garvais said.
The opportunity to participate in a real-world science project was just one of the reasons the students traveled to Costa Rica, said Ann Baumann, a Mound Westonka guidance counselor who facilitated the trip.
Beyond her counseling duties, Baumann also acts as coordinator of the Westonka Summer Institute, a program now entering its third year.
The program offers credit-earning, international learning experiences for its students over summer break that have some sort of Minnesota connection.
In 2008, its inaugural year, the program took 10 students to China, making use of a connection the district has with Best Buy, which has numerous operations there.
This year, eight students, two teachers and Baumann traveled to Costa Rica, studied leaf cutter ants with Pinto and stayed at Finca La Anita, a jungle eco-lodge built with the financial backing of Minnesotans.
Plans for the 2010 trip have yet to be announced, even though the location is already in the works.
Besides the Minnesota connection at Finca La Anita, the Mound Westonka students experienced another Midwest association during their Costa Rican stay.
Their lead researcher, Pinto, spent years living in Madison, Wis., working with a scientist at the University of Wisconsin named Cameron Currie.
Currie is also interested in leaf cutter ants. He hopes to develop an organic pesticide from the leaf cutter ant fungus that could be used by farmers here in the Midwest.
It's probably too soon to tell whether or not any of the experiments the Mound Westonka students helped conduct will lead to a break through in the study of leaf cutter ants.
Yet that was never really the point of the program, Baumann said. Because of her role as a high school guidance counselor, she is aware of the application processes in place at the nation's colleges and universities and she knows the type of incoming students those institutions are seeking.
She said she knows that many universities are looking for "well-rounded kids that think beyond their communities." The Carlson School at the University of Minnesota now requires all of its students to participate in a study abroad program, Baumann added.
Students who participate in a study abroad experience "gain resilience," Baumann said.
"You can see the change," she said. "They come home more thoughtful and with a severely different perspective."
Baumann recommends her students talk about their international experience in their college application essays and interviews.
"Now they have an international study experience on their official transcripts," she said.
"Globalization is happening everywhere and now these kids are a part of it," Baumann said.
On Tuesday, Aug. 25, the Mound Westonka students who participated in the Costa Rica program presented their travel experience to a small crowd at the Science Museum of Minnesota that included state Sen. Gen Olson and Minnesota Commissioner of Education Alice Seagren.
Once classes return to session, the students will also appear on the school's closed-circuit television program that broadcasts announcements.
Going forward, Baumann would love to see even more students travel with the Westonka Summer Institute.
The program, however, receives no funding from the school district. It operates solely on the tuition it charges and whatever private donations it can solicit.
The Costa Rica trip cost $3,100 per student. That amount covered all travel arrangements for the 10-day stay.
"The students could literally land in Costa Rica and not have to pay for a single thing the whole time they are there," Baumann said.
Thirty-two students submitted applications to join the Costa Rica group. Of those, 12 were chosen to attend. Yet because of the cost, only eight were able to go.
Jon Pilling considered himself lucky that he was able to join the group. He will be a junior at Mound Westonka.
Pilling was drawn to the trip because of its scientific nature. In a previous school year, he'd completed a large project on insects and the Costa Rica trip, he said, was a real life opportunity to interact with the insect world.
Plus, he likes to travel. When he was a young child, his family lived in Europe for about three years while his father worked for an international company.
Yet this was Pilling's first trip to Latin America, and it was also his first journey into a developing country.
The area in which the Mound Westonka students stayed was rural. It didn't have Internet access or cell phone service. Land line telephones were few and far between.
The roads, Pilling said, were not paved. Once it rained, which was often given they were in a tropical area, every road turned to mud.
But that didn't keep him from soaking up the environment and learning a ton. "The terrain was all hills, mountains and volcanoes," he said.
"The local farmers had to grow their crops on a slant, so they can't use machines. They have to manually plant and harvest everything," he said.
"The way they farm was really different," Pilling added. "They don't use pesticides, and they let weeds grow among the crops. Things don't grow in straight rows."
Along with the other students, Pilling became familiar with the local crops - macadamia nuts, aloe vera, ginger root, oregano, papaya and plantains.
And while he has no plans to study agriculture, he found value in his rural Costa Rican stay. "I'd definitely do it again," he said.
"I got to learn something you can't learn in a classroom," Pilling said. "Everything was hands-on and you just don't get that in school."
