Students at Mid-Pacific Institute are using high-tech tools to preserve Hawaii’s heritage, working with partners such as the Bishop Museum, Iolani Palace and Pacific Aviation Museum.

This fall the teens wielded 3D scanners to capture details from every angle of a rare sea star, or starfish, and other creatures in Bishop Museum’s vast collection. Then they stitched the data together into a digital replica that can be shared globally and sculpted through 3D printing into a model that people can touch — not just view behind glass.

“Laser scanning allows our students to capture real objects from the size of a building down to an object you can hold in your hand, capture it down to the millimeter,” said Paul Turnbull, Mid-Pacific’s president. “So our classrooms are now in museums and in the community.”

In October students in a historic-preservation course used 3D LiDAR scanning to digitally preserve an elaborate Thai pavilion, known as a “sala,” at the East-West Center. Other projects include the coronation pavilion at Iolani Palace and a historic fighter plane at Pacific Aviation Museum.

“It’s a win-win — the kids get the hands-on experience and education, and the museum gets the opportunity to have something preserved or replicated,” said museum studies teacher Chris Falk, whose students worked with Bishop Museum staff to record marine invertebrates.

“They’re not just doing something in class that I grade and it goes away,” Falk said. “This is something that, depending on the quality, could be part of a museum exhibit for a number of years. They’re impacting the community, working with it in a real way.”

Since Turnbull took the helm at the Manoa campus five years ago, he has been building its suite of high-tech tools with help from donors: laser scanning, 360-degree video, 3D printing, virtual reality and even motion capture.

The aim, he says, is “to move students away from content consumption and toward content creation.”

“The whole point is, let’s get kids experiencing the real world, bringing history to life, telling the story with their own voice and technology, bringing those worlds together,” Turnbull said.

Two years ago eighth-graders recorded the lay of the land at Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park in 360-degree video for Catalog.Earth. The nonprofit, which documents precious and endangered landscapes for everyone to see, invited Mid-Pacific students to pitch in after seeing their work from a field trip to Makapuu posted online by a teacher.

“Obviously, since then so much has happened with the massive Kilauea eruption,” said Julie Funasaki Yuen, director of communications for Mid-Pacific. “Our kids preserved history. That’s really important for our local community.”

High school students at Mid-Pacific also collaborated with CyArk, an Oakland, Calif.-­based nonprofit that shares cultural heritage sites digitally, to document and study the remains of Honouliuli Internment Camp.

Falk said that using 3D laser scanners to create digital representations is tougher than it looks.

“It’s not easy to take a dozen pictures with thousands of data points and merge them together to make the thing look right,” he said. “There is a degree of skill and a degree of artistry with it.”

Long known for its strength in the arts, Mid-­Pacific was an early adopter of technology, and in 2012 became the first school in Hawaii to provide an iPad to each student in grades three and above. The school has 1,550 students from preschool through grade 12.

Turnbull said Mid-Pacific teaches “computational thinking” as a means of problem solving from an early age. In kindergarten, youngsters play with blocks known as Cubelets that have different properties, including sensors, and can be pieced together to create robots of their own design.

Older students have access to virtual reality equipment that allows them to get to know academic subjects intimately and also create new content of their own, with art and animation.

Senior Kai Yasuda vividly remembers a car crash he and his buddies experienced through virtual reality in physics class when they were studying motion and forces. This fall, in Advanced Placement Biology, he walked through a human heart via interactive software developed for medical students at Stanford University.

He and his classmates took turns donning a VR headset and navigating the various chambers of the Stanford Virtual Heart, following the flow of blood through the complex organ and identifying different parts. Some of them detected the hiss of a heart murmur and uncovered its cause, a leaky valve.

“I’m definitely very lucky to be here and have all of this technology available,” said Yasuda, who hopes to become a doctor. “Sometimes I feel like almost spoiled. … It really does help with our learning and our moving into a more technological world.”

Students also had a chance to manipulate and dissect actual beef hearts. Their teacher, Michael Valentine, said he gives students different ways to learn so the knowledge will become ingrained, rather than crammed for a test and quickly forgotten.

Last year Mid-Pacific students took part in an empathy study with Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Through virtual reality software they experienced what it was like to be evicted, have to sell belongings and live in a car, until it was towed away and they were left homeless on the street.

Turnbull sees the integration of humanities and technology as a key to effective education.

“We recognize that today’s world isn’t about silos, it isn’t about one person having all the knowledge in his or her head,” Turnbull said. “It’s all about the application of knowledge, both in person and highly technical ways.”