POULSBO — Upon stepping into the classroom in her first year at Christ the King Academy, junior high science teacher Robin Breakey was surveying the science room closet, when she found an old bag of dead frogs.

The formaldehyde-soaked frogs — typically used for rudimentary dissection projects — had been sitting in the closet for years and were past the point of being productive tools for students. So, Breakey wanted to get rid of them, but she wasn’t quite sure how.

“Then I thought … we could launch them,” she said.

And launch them they did.

Monday, the CKA seventh, eighth and ninth graders, gathered on the school’s field, armed with homemade catapults which propelled the lifeless amphibians through the morning air.

“We’ve had these frogs for quite a while, and now they are too old to do any dissecting with, so we wanted to bury them,” said CKA principal DeAnna Henning. “But we didn’t want to just bury them, we thought we’d give them one last hurrah.”

Students were tasked with building catapulting devices out of whatever materials they could find, using whatever research resources were available to them, Breakey said. And when the kids hauled their creations into the CKA gym Monday morning, she was more than impressed.

“They are way bigger and better than I had thought they would be,” she said.

The catapults, were mostly made of wood with bows ranging from surgical tubing to bungee cords strapped to swinging arms comprised of wooden two-by-fours, while some students utilized PVC pipe.

The builder of the winning catapult — Mitch Watland, who launched his frog more than 80 feet — built his device under the watchful eye of his older brother, piecing together a wooden box, a wooden arm and surgical tube springs.

Through the catapult construction and subsequent frog launching, the goal of the lesson was learned, and made apparent by the students’ smiling faces and the positive banter which flew back and forth between frog departures.

“This is like the coolest science experiment we’ve ever done,” eighth grader Dominique Bozarth said while watching another volley of frogs fly.

“This has algebra in it in terms of the angles as well as science, but I’m all about fun,” Breakey said.