Doing science is about asking the right questions as much as it is about answering them. That was one of the lessons that Dartmouth College biology students brought to fifth-graders at Samuel Morey Elementary School in Fairlee Wednesday on the second-to-last week of the Rivendell School District's winter “science camp.”

From late January to early March, since 2007, two-dozen Dartmouth students have visited second- through seventh-grade classrooms across the district once a week to lead students through an activity-based science lesson. Educators at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich coordinate the program. Over the six-week program, they hold teaching seminars for the college's undergraduate and graduate students, training them in techniques that help younger students understand the process of science as well as the concepts. They also help develop lesson plans that fit into the grade's broader science curriculum.

“Today we are going to do what scientists do all the time,” said Ryan Urbanowicz, a Dartmouth graduate student in genetics, to Dan Noseworthy's fifth-grade class at Samuel Morey at the start of the lesson last week. They would be coming up with a “testable question,” then designing an experiment to try to answer it. The questions should focus on the concepts of “conduction,” “radiation” and “equilibrium,” which they discussed in previous weeks, Urbanowicz said.

Across the hallway, Lori Derosier's fourth-graders were on the move. They headed to a large and very dark storage closet to understand how the rotation of the moon around the Earth changes the moon's appearance through the month.

The students carried round white Styrofoam balls, moons on thin sticks. Their guest teachers brought a bright lamp to stand in for the sun and invited the students to face away from the light, holding the sticks out in front of them so that for each one, the entire ball was illuminated. As they moved the balls to the side and rotated toward the light, the balls fell farther and farther into shadow.

The exercise, taken from an Insights “Sun, Earth, Moon” lesson kit, is exciting for the students, said Derosier, and brings alive what they are learning about. “It's really able to take the kids beyond the book,” she said.

Equally important is for students to have the opportunity to meet people who work as scientists. Before camp, when Derosier asked her fourth-graders what they knew about scientists, most said that a scientist was “a person in a lab coat,” she said.

Noseworthy agreed that the exposure to new people is an important part of the program. “It gives them a chance to see that people in the real world really do do science and that you can do it, too,” he said.

The Dartmouth students participate in science camp through a professional development grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute led by molecular biologist Roger Sloboda. The goal is to give the biology students experience communicating with nonprofessionals about science as well as exposure to teaching elementary and junior high, said Montshire Museum Education Director Greg DeFrancis.

The museum is also involved in a broader partnership with Rivendell -- which includes Samuel Morey, Westshire Elementary School in West Fairlee and Rivendell Academy in Orford -- to support and expand the district's science curriculum. The idea is that relationship will in turn serve as a model for how a museum and a school district can help each other, DeFrancis said.

“You have a museum that has really rich resources … and you have a school with good teachers who are saying, ‘What can we do differently?' ” said DeFrancis. The question the project is trying to answer, he said, is “if you put those two things together over a long-term period, what will happen and how can you take advantage of those resources most efficiently.”

Dartmouth students have been enthusiastic, particularly those in graduate school, said DeFrancis.

Urbanowicz said that he enjoys the opportunity to make connections outside the Dartmouth community. Also, he expects that what he has learned in two years with the program will aid him in eventually teaching at the college level, as well. Students of every age need teachers who give them opportunities to ask their own questions. “A lot of what we learn applies all down the line,” he said. Plus, it is fun.

Back in the classroom, Urbanowicz told students that there are lots of interesting questions out there. “The hard part of this is that you need to come up with an interesting question that you can also test,” he said.

One group of students -- Amber Baker, Katlin McCool, Cam Surprenant and Hayley Taylor -- decided they wanted to find out which colors absorbed the most heat over a 10-minute period. They were figuring out the details of an experiment involving four lamps and four colored pieces of construction paper, each backed by a thermo- meter lodged within a Styrofoam block, when DeFrancis came over to talk to them.

What was the variable in their experiment, DeFrancis asked them. The color, said McCool. And what would stay the same? The light, the distance between the color block and the light, the students added, one by one. Basically, everything else, they concluded.

They were well on their way, DeFrancis told them. “You guys are brilliant!” he said.