Since the introduction of the Mid-Pacific Exploratory Program (MPX) in 2011, it has changed the way of learning at Mid-Pacific Institute. Basic topics such as science, language arts, and social studies are taught in new and different ways to freshmen and sophomores.

MPX teaches these courses to teach the students various skills in a class, encouraging group work and collaboration. This program is offered for students who are not interested in the standard course offered at Mid-Pacific, which follows a more traditional teaching style. The standard course consists of fewer projects and group work and more individual test-taking and essays.

The MPX course not only does school work, but it extends outside of the classroom. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the MPX students were able to do community outreach, like the project for a podcast with the Honolulu Zoo to help teach wildlife conservation.

The current community outreach that the MPX program is doing with Henry Hail’s class is participating in a project to help with a local homeless shelter. Another freshman class is currently working on nutrition and diets, which ties into the homeless shelter through booklets that can help with diets for the shelter. They are combining science and math by creating a diet plan, which looks at the macromolecules in their diets. The math comes in by taking all the calories from the macromolecules and adding them up to create the ideal diet.

Other classes are doing exciting projects, such as Gregg Kaneko’s sophomore class making a rocket to test. The testing of rockets is to look at the science of physics in a fun way. This also allows students to work to build and design the rocket in a group setting, unlike a regular physics test that students in the standard program would be doing.

“There is more activity than testing and more project based learning,” sophomore Cody Long said.

The MPX course is an expansive way of learning, and it is a great alternative to the traditional and standard way of learning. MPX is expanding the boundaries at Mid-Pacific Institute.

“All of the projects connect, [like] language arts connect to science in a fun way. It really helped me learn how to connect two things together and work on different problems while being able to build my skills in working with groups of people,” Jayse Uemura said.