To push students in the Academy in Math and Science program to think like scientists, the McKeesport Area School District is helping them to look like scientists and equipping them with laptops.

At a ceremony last Thursday afternoon, 17 members of the fifth-grade class of the AIMS program received special, kid-sized lab coats embroidered with their names. Those in the AIMS fourth-grade class will receive their equipment this week.

The fifth-graders also received their own small Dell laptops, which director of federal programs Michael Matta said is part of an initiative to make the AIMS classroom more environmentally friendly.

"It's our goal to have that classroom be almost paperless," Mr. Matta said.

This is the second year of AIMS, which was started for a group of fourth-graders at Cornell Intermediate School. The academy's second class of fourth-graders starts this year, and another class will start next year.

The students will learn word processing and will complete their lab reports and other assignments on the laptops, then e-mail the information to their teachers. They'll also learn how to organize data on spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel.

Mr. Matta said teachers also will conduct some lessons on the Internet at appropriate Web sites.

The program was started last year to expand opportunities for students at Cornell Intermediate who wanted to focus on math and science. It offers an expanded curriculum in those subjects and includes far more hands-on activities and experiments and science-based field trips than the standard curriculum.

In fact, most of the curriculum centers on science. For example, students practice their writing skills through completing lab reports and practice their reading through science-related literature.

Funded through federal school improvement money, the program was meant to improve the image of Cornell Intermediate, which has failed to make Annual Yearly Progress for the past eight years.

That means students who live in Cornell's neighborhoods can choose to go to the district's other intermediate school, Francis McClure in White Oak. Mr. Matta said he hoped AIMS would be a draw for students in Cornell's neighborhoods who were considering a move to Francis McClure.

Cornell failed to meet AYP again in the 2008-09 school year, but special education students were the only group that did not score high enough on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exam.