Field Trips

Circling the world for three months on an ocean liner while earning a semester's worth of college credits has been a life-changing adventure for thousands of students who have joined the University of Pittsburgh's Semester at Sea program. But a recent handful of accidental deaths has some Southern California parents contending that the experience should come with a warning label.

"Rope!" the biologist shouts, before the morning's divebombing begins. In the weak sunlight, Joel E. "Jeep" Pagel, 38, unfurls his faded rope down the 425-foot cliff, along with a backup rope.

Scores of second-graders scrambled through the airy Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, huddling inside simulators to feel the shaking of an earthquake, building mini-ski jumps to learn about speed and shaping wet sand into riverbanks to observe erosion.

The Ventura County Maritime Museum and the Channel Islands marine floating lab will combine resources to offer a maritime history and oceanography program to fourth- and fifth-graders.

A skunk, a bobcat and an owl were among animals seen by a group of 15 students at Reseda Elementary School on Thursday morning as they entered the Earthmobile, a reconstruction of a canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains built inside a 48-foot tractor-trailer.

Standing aboard the wind-swept deck of the Pilgrim, a replica of a 19th-Century ship, the young sailors snapped to attention Tuesday afternoon as the surly first mate demonstrated the proper way to coil a rope.