In the school parking lot, senior Kayla Livingston looks at the aftermath of the burning houses. “I think it turned out good. My friend and I worked on it for a while. We put a lot of decorations in it. It burned very well, weirdly.” She wishes she would have built the house instead of buying one if she could go back and do it again.

In Kelly Swanson’s Analytical Chemistry classes, students got to create their very own houses out of any material and watch them turn to ash.

“There was a lot of planning that went into it, so it’s really cool getting to watch it come to life,” chemistry teacher Kelly Swanson said.

Students learned about burn patterns that are caused by fires. To see a visual representation, the students all built houses out of different materials and created a story about how a fire started in their houses on Monday, Nov. 25. Then a firefighter from the Shelby Township Fire Department came out to light them on fire. 

“I think it went well, and he provided a lot of different examples so kids could see all the different ways that houses could burn,” senior Paige Hays said.

In the aftermath, chemistry students got to see the different ways materials affect the spreading of a fire. They also got to see the different burn patterns and how the design and structure of a house can make a fire spread more or less.

“It was cool to see,” senior Kayla Livingston said. “It helped me learn about our arson lesson.”