GUILFORD – His body comfortably perched on top of a desk, William Thompson fired questions Friday at the dozen students seated in his slightly cluttered laboratory at Piscataquis Community High School.

From the answers given, most of the students in Thompson’s physics class clearly understood the difference between speed, velocity and acceleration.

“There you go,” Thompson said, when a student partially answered a question and another piped in to finish.

“You’re getting these terms better and better,” he praised the group, before sending them to labs nearby to chart the differences between speed, velocity and acceleration on computer-generated graphs.

These sophomores are fulfilling a requirement implemented last year that every student must have at least one year of physics, as well as a year of biology and chemistry before they graduate. The change is one few schools in the nation have embraced.

Already, school officials are seeing the fruits of the requirement, according to PCHS Principal Bruce Lindberg. He said it has not only improved the aspirations of students, but also their test scores. And that has caught the attention of some national education experts.

Next month, PCHS, which has been in the limelight before for its progressive thinking and actions, will be visited by a team of officials from the Stranahan Foundation of Aspen, Colorado. Representatives of the private foundation operated by world-renown physicist George Stranahan, want to study the school as a national model.

PCHS students now take a full year of biology as freshmen; 18 weeks of conceptual physics and a similar number of weeks of chemistry as sophomores; 18 weeks each of chemistry and mathematical physics as juniors, and a choice of a second year of biology, physics or chemistry as seniors.

Prior to last year, the school used the state graduation requirement of two years of science and two years of mathematics.

Thompson said that previously only 30 to 40 percent of the junior class took chemistry and less than that signed up for physics. “We’ve actually brought up the bootstraps of the student who was probably at the lower [end of his class],” he said.

“Our kids do better than the state and national averages in science basically because we expose them to more,” Lindberg said. Nationally, only 16 percent of students take physics, he noted. “It really opens doors for kids, post- secondary.” Lindberg said that when PCHS students apply to colleges and other higher learning institutions, they are “light years ahead of most students.” Unlike many students, PCHS students do not have to take remedial classes to catch up with their peers, he said.

To help the students better understand the sciences, classes are geared more to laboratory work and a large percentage of the assignments are done on simulators.

“All of our sciences are laboratory based; we have the belief that kids learn by doing rather than listening,” the principal said.

In order to do this, the teachers, including Thompson, a 34-year veteran of teaching, had to change their way of thinking and their method of instruction.

Thompson fully adopted the new philosophy of more hands-on experience early on. “It’s mentally seeing it and doing it,” he said. The use of computers and motion sensors gives students real accurate results. “It gives a student a very small percentage of error,” he noted.

“Physics is pretty cool,” Josh Higgins, a student from Cambridge, said Friday. He and his classmates were eagerly participating in the simulation assignment.

“I would guess the biggest hurdle is when kids start it [physics] they question whether they can do it,” Lindberg said. But the students soon gain confidence thanks to the interaction from teachers like Thompson. “He can modify things so well that it reaches all kids,” the principal said.

And Thompson’s classroom is living proof. When a student appeared to be somewhat puzzled about the necessity of graphs, Thompson said those who work with physics look at graphs continually and told the student that graphs are used in everyday life, from sports to finances. “It’s like learning the alphabet,” he said. “Without the alphabet it would be difficult to spell a word, right?”