POULSBO — It’s far from the typical classroom.

It does have four walls, a door and various stations for curious students to do hands-on experiments. There’s no desks or windows. But this room does have a view: There is a gaping hole in the middle of the floor revealing an up close and personal look at what’s happening in Liberty Bay.

Oh: This classroom also floats.

After two years of sweating blood and tears, Marine Science Center Foundation members have reached a peak milestone.

This month they hosted the first-ever classes in the floating lab, welcoming school children from North Kitsap, Bainbridge Island and Bremerton school districts.

Susan Crawford, the center’s education director, said developing the lab has been an act of love for a while, and now that it’s finally happening she’s overjoyed about all the benefits it will bring to students throughout Kitsap.

“It’s putting theory into practice. It’s application,” Crawford said, as she stood outside the center Tuesday morning, awaiting a bus load of Suquamish Elementary fifth-graders. She then demonstrated the real-life, applicable lessons learned while in the lab. “One station out in the lab is going to be electrolysis — how much electricity is generated in salt water from a variety of metals. If you’re on a boat electrolysis is very important. We allow kids to experiment with different metals and depths and allow kids to make the connection of electricity in water. It’s hard to do, and you can’t do that in the classroom.”

Once out in the lab, after navigating a floating walk way through the marina, one can see first-hand how the experiments come to life for the students and the pleasure they experience while learning in the lab.

Students rotate through five stations, spending 12 minutes on each: predicting the weather through water turbidity; dissolved oxygen; observing a floating reef through an underwater video camera; water salinity; and observing a small droplet of water under a microscope to locate zoo and phytoplankton.

One student wondered what would happen if they caught something other than a plankton. Another mentioned it was all “Weird and interesting.”

Shane Peterson, a Suquamish Elementary fifth-grader, was amazed when he observed some plankton, under a microscope, but projected on a TV screen.

“It’s really interesting. If you look and see how small the water (droplet) is and it’s clear and on the TV you can see all that stuff in that tiny drop of water,” he said, as miniscule plankton swam around. “It’s pretty cool because you get to see all the stuff that’s actually living in the water.”

Fellow classmate Trenna McDaniel, who’d just walked away from the salinity station, said being in the lab is “cool” because she got to learn all about “What’s actually in the water around my house.”

“I’ve learned that we should protect the water and not pollute it or anything,” she added.

Right outside the lab students studied the water to predict the weather.

Crawford said so far the students have been “dead on” in their predictions of the following day’s weather. On Monday a group of Pearson Elementary students predicted rain for Tuesday, and sure enough the rain came.

During the field trip to the lab, students also tour the aquarium and spend time in an actual classroom. What’s learned in the classroom ties into the lab experiments.

Inside on Tuesday the kids experimented with barnacles, as they changed the water’s level of salinity to observe how it impacted the barnacles’ feeding behavior.

The students learned a barnacle lays on its back while its feeding and kicks out its feet to catch food, and a barnacle is a member of the crab family.

They didn’t hesitate to share their knowledge.

One boy mentioned a barnacle looks like a plankton when it’s a baby, another said their feet look like little ferns, and still another compared the barnacle feet to “Drag racers.”

“It’s like a drag racer, it just kicks out,” he said.

These students are in Kristy Dressler’s class, and Dressler was quite impressed with what her students discovered.

“In here there’s a really good integration of writing and math with science and good hands-on experience with the scientific method. It’s great,” Dressler said. “It’s excellent preparation for the science fair. This is their first exposure to the whole process so they’re learning key vocabulary and it’s the first time they’re really using that terminology.”

Crawford said the lab came to fruition through a loan from the Naval Undersea Museum Foundation in Keyport, a Department of Education grant, state funding, the city of Poulsbo and tremendous community philanthropy.

“Probably more than $1 million of work was done with less than a quarter million in cash,” Crawford said. “It is a wonderful gift to the community.”

Her hope is to secure finances to fully fund the lab year after year.

For more information on the center and its programs visit, www.poulsbomsc.org.