It’s eighth-hour on a sunny Friday at Ellis Middle School, and the students are excited — not just about getting out of class for the weekend, but for some advanced-level thinking.

The 28 seventh-graders Tom Fritz is instructing qualified in grade 6 for the Integrated Physics and Technology (IPT) course. Started last fall, the new class offers a mix of physics theory and hands-on projects.

“The top 60 were selected in sixth grade from this class,” said Fritz, who teaches IPT with Steve Weisgram. The children selected could voluntarily choose to enroll in the class.

Students were wrapping up their robotics and earthquake tower assignments Friday. Many were also completing PowerPoint presentations about their projects.

The group crowded briefly around Molly Kestner and Madison Wuertz, who tested their earthquake tower on a tremor table — which simulates the movements of an earthquake — to determine its durability. The girls nervously awaited their tower’s fate as Fritz gradually increased the speed of the “earthquake.”

“(We) had to make towers out of balsa wood,” Kestner explained. “We had to come up with a design.”

“It took us a long time,” Wuertz said. “When it breaks, then they write down by how much.”

The girls scored a 16, about average for the class, they said. Some towers fell apart within a few seconds, others withstood the violent shaking much longer.

Another project the students worked on was the NXT Robot Challenge. Again working in pairs, the students assembled small robots from kits and programmed them to maneuver through an obstacle course and compete against other robots. The obstacle course requires knocking over balls, turning corners and navigating the robots as instructed for the challenge.

Students receive points for traversing from section to section. Lines are taped along tables; robots are programmed to detect different colors of tape.

“They had experience working with different sensors,” Fritz said of the students.

The robots, produced by the Lego company, were created to simulate Mars rovers, Fritz said.

Ellis principal Katie Berglund said a $4,500 grant from Weyerhaeuser (now International Paper) helped fund the robots.