The group of students occupying the classrooms throughout Southwestern Michigan College Tuesday morning got to try on a lot of proverbial hats.

For the kids in classroom 1608, they got to try their hand at being an astrologist. A few doors down, in 1610, the students experienced what its like to be a geologist.

Inside the Mathews Conference Center located on the other side of campus, a group of Dowagiac fourth-graders pretended to act like deer.

Students from Dowagiac, Cassopolis and Edwardsburg school districts participated in the 22nd annual Elementary Science Olympiad, organized by the Lewis Cass Intermediate School District. As in previous years, the students participated in a variety of competitive and noncompetitive activities, selected based on grade-level and particular scientific field.

For fourth-grade students, the activity in the life science discipline was a game known as “Oh Deer!” The students broke into two groups, one representing “deers” and the other representing the natural resources of food, water and shelter — three things every animal needs to survive.

Whenever the person in charge of the event shouted, “GO,” the students on the deer side rushed over to the other team on the other side of the room, attempting to match themselves with the resource they needed to survive that round. The students who were matched up by one of the deer joined their ranks, while those deer that failed became a resource the

next round.

“The activity gives the kids an understanding of what happens in nature when there’s not enough resources, and how animals reproduce when there is an abundance,” said Nanette Schurr, the instructor coordinating the activity.

Schurr, a science and language arts teacher at Sam Adams Elementary, carried over the activity from the instructor who coordinated it last year, she said. Besides reinforcing the lessons they’re currently learning in the classroom, it gives them a chance to get out of school for the morning and let off some steam.

“It’s good for them to learn in a different way than they’re normally used to,” she said.

The activities taking place in the classrooms inside the student services building were a little more low key but just as educational. Inside one of the rooms, teams of fifth-grade students were given shots of lunar landscapes taken by a telescope in Hawaii, and were tasked with identifying the craters, crevices and other formations that dot the moon’s surface.

“It’s a cool activity,” said Diane Hartsig, the organizer for the activity and a fifth-grade teacher at Justus Gage elementary. “Some of these things you can see with the naked eye, so the kids will be able to identify them whenever they look at the moon at night.”

While certainly fun, the biggest thing students should take away from the morning is the important role that science plays in society, Hartsig said.

“Many of the kids don’t realize these things have applications in their daily lives,” she said.