Imagine spending all day at school working on a movie, developing a video game or learning about how the brain operates during sleep.

Much like college students, who often focus on one subject, high schoolers at Redmond Proficiency Academy spent most of January immersed in those or other topics. The public charter school has been operating the program, in which students take one subject with one teacher, each January and June for six years.

“The idea is to replicate what happens at many colleges and universities, where they have an intersession between terms,” said Jon Bullock, the academy’s executive director.

“It’s also an opportunity for us to offer some courses we might not typically offer during the school year.”

Some of the classes were offered for the first time this year, while others are back by popular demand, Bullock said. Teachers pick the topics based on subjects they are passionate about.

“We believe students learn best when they have a passionate teacher,” he said.

Redmond Proficiency Academy has more than 500 high school students, and all of them focused on a single class in January, Bullock said.

Students showed off what they learned at a Jan. 20 showcase before dozens of people at the downtown Redmond school. A group of kids made music sitting on cajons, six-sided percussion instruments that originated in Peru. Others dramatized the classic story of “The Three Little Pigs.”

Another class spent three weeks writing works of long-form fiction. They came in each day to work on their stories, all of which ended up at least 17,500 words — or 60 double-spaced pages in Google Docs. Together, the stories totaled more than 800 pages, all written in three weeks.

Another class worked on the “chemistry of cooking.” Students conducted a taste test at the showcase, where teachers and students tried cookies made with different compositions. Some of the cookies were thicker than others, but the judges ended up preferring those made with the directions on a pack of Nestle Toll House morsels.

Junior Cecilia Ulam, 16, designed her own tiny house as part of a science, technology, engineering, art and math project in Amy Mitchell’s class. Mitchell said she became interested in the tiny house movement a few years ago and found that teaching it was a way to discuss the economic and environmental impacts of tiny houses, defined as homes smaller than 400 square feet.

The project was special for Cecilia, who lives in a tiny house with three family members in Madras.

“There’s definitely not a lot of privacy there, but you get used to it,” Cecilia said. “It’s pretty nice having your family there. It prevents you from arguing.”

Students in Mitchell’s class designed their own tiny house models, which were on display at the showcase. They also will present them at the school’s sustainability fair in April.

Cecilia eventually wants to build her own tiny house, place it on a trailer and take it on a scenic tour of Montana, she said.

Other students learned the art of digital filmmaking during their January term. Junior Dalton Pond, 16, and his freshman brother, Carson, 14, spent 18 hours at Peak Airsoft in Bend, where they took footage to whittle down to a six-minute film. Peak Airsoft is a local site for a sport in which players shoot at each other using guns that fire plastic pellets.

“They basically told us how they promote gun safety and how they promote the sport,” Dalton said.

The Ponds spent several school days working on the project after they were done filming.

“It kind of showed us how hard filmmaking can be,” Dalton said. “Piecing it together is fun and all, but it’s really time-consuming.”

Math, science and robotics teacher Josh White’s students designed video games during the January term. He gave demonstrations of some of the games students came up with, which include “Sushi Ninja” and “Jabazilla,” at the showcase.

“When I was in school, we took auto shop, where you went to work on cars,” he told the audience. “Now it’s 2016, and there’s a lot of money to be made on video games.”

Other subjects, like theater and the Holocaust, were also studied during the January term, Bullock said. The classes varied, but all gave an appreciation for the learning process.

“By focusing on just one thing at a time, they can really understand the depth of a subject matter,” Bullock said.

— Reporter: 541-548-2186, gfolsom@redmondspokesman.com