RIVER HILLS, Wisconsin USA -- Seventeen-year-old Spencer Greaves' interest in rocketry goes back to 1999, when he first saw the movie "October Sky" - a true story about bestselling author Homer Hickman's adolescent quest to become a rocket scientist in a town full of coal miners.

"I watched it, like, non-stop for a week," Greaves said. "From then on (rocketry) has just been a passion."

Today, that passion still burns like the flames of a rocket headed for the heavens. You can see it in the sophisticated schematic drawings of Greaves' latest science project. Its aim: to use rockets to launch thermal imaging equipment over Lake Michigan to capture precision images of pollution, then remotely guide the rockets carrying the equipment safely back to land.

Spencer Greaves, a University School of Milwaukee student, is designing a model rocket large enough to carry imaging equipment over Lake Michigan. Photo/Rick Wood

Greaves' project is just one of several that University School of Milwaukee students are working on in special project rooms in the school's new 33,500-square-foot Science Center. In addition to the four independent project rooms, the center has six classroom-labs - two each for physics, chemistry and biology. It also has a greenhouse attached.

It was built as part of a $9.5 million project that also involved a fitness center. Funding came from the school's Next Generation capital campaign.

Before the new science lab and its project rooms were constructed, students had to take their projects down each day or store them off-campus and endure other hassles that slowed the progress of their work. It was enough to make a young scientist mad.

Now, students can easily work on their projects in their spare time at school and readily receive the counsel of their science teachers. And keeping the projects secure - or free of "unwanted variables," as one teacher put it - is as easy as closing the door.

"It's great," Greaves said during a recent interview in one of the project rooms, where his first telescope and 7-foot rocket sat near a wall opposite the schematic drawings of his project. "It's very practical, and it makes it a lot easier for me to work on the project."

Educators say the project rooms enable students to take their projects to another level.

"They're actually doing long-term scientific studies," said Paul Greeney, chairman of the science department at University School of Milwaukee. "They will succeed. They will fail. And they will rework it.

"But they really get to know what real science experience is (in a way) that you can't even really come close to in a regular lab class situation."

Science teacher Brian Pack made similar observations.

"They aren't just going into someone's lab and doing what someone else tells them to do," Pack said. "These projects have grown over time, and they own them."

Indeed, most of the projects that students work on and store in the project rooms have their genesis in projects they did earlier in high school. The projects have evolved to the point where the students plan to enter them in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May in Albuquerque, N.M. The school regularly prepares students to compete in the science fair, the world's largest for pre-college students.

Two of the students are conducting experiments on algae.

Sophia Zebell, 17, is working on a way to convert algae into power. She is growing algae that she plans to dry out and send to the University of North Dakota, where they have a gasifier that can, well, gasify the algae and get data on how much energy can be obtained from it. Zebell said she got the idea for the project after combining her knowledge of gasifiers and recent efforts to turn algae into hydrogen.

Her ultimate goal is to design an algae power plant - something she said would drive down energy costs, decrease global warming and be less harsh on the environment than mining for coal.

"The great thing about using algae is one of the byproducts of creating electricity is always carbon dioxide, which usually goes into the atmosphere," Zebell said. "But with the algae, you can send the carbon dioxide back into the bioreactor where the algae are growing, and then the algae will feed off the carbon dioxide and reproduce off that, and that way there is less emission and less pollution into the atmosphere."

If successful, Zebell's experiment would benefit immensely from the work of Lauren Rosenberg, 17, who is researching ways to use silicon nanoparticles to accelerate algae growth.

The project represents the culmination of two years' prior research in which Rosenberg tested the effects of ultrasound on different bacteria. "The results were kind of predictable," she said of the bacteria's resultant death under the ultrasound waves and another experiment in which she tested the effects that infrared light had on bacterial growth - she found that it had none.

This year, she's using the infrared light again, only this time on pure algae. The special project room makes it easier to spur the project's progress.

"Just being able to have a place means I can work on it whenever I want during the day and more consistently run experiments," Rosenberg said. "It's great. I don't know how else to describe it."

Greaves is similarly enthused.

"When I first saw the new science wing, I was totally freaked out," Greaves said. "Now with these project rooms, (the school) is really focusing on the students."