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HARKER'S ISLAND – For about a month, a group of students from Harker's Island have spent several hours a week building a boat to hone their math and science skills.

Veteran boatbuilder Heber Guthrie is helping students complete the 16-foot skiff.

"When you actually take your hands and put it on the wood and you make that saw cut or you use that drill or sander, it's just a different world then just talking about it," Guthrie said.

As they build and paint, students are learning about things like metric conversions, resistance to fluids and geometry.

"It makes a lot more sense if we can compare it with a benchmark of knowledge in building this boat, in how we obtained a right angle in the stern of the boat. So it gives us relevance," April Lilley, principal at Harker's Island School, said.

Teachers are also taking the lessons into the classroom. Students are building scale models of the boat to learn about proportions and buoyancy.

"It helps you learn about angles and how things have to be a certain precise way for things to actually work in the world and it kind of proves that math, you actually use it in the real world," seventh grader Sammie Meyeer said.

The school chose boat building because it's a strong part of Harker's Island heritage.

"We're kind of going back and learning about where we live is really how it used to be," Meyeer said.