MILFORD — A “Buccaneer boat” will set sail this fall, traversing the ocean’s currents, tides and different weather while Milford School District students keep track from Delaware.

“The idea is to really have an opportunity to bring our community together and do some celebrating of learning and do some modeling,” said Bridget Amory, director of student learning. “We’re on a peninsula; we’re surrounded by water. There are so many different curricular connections that are available through a project like this. And, of course, being the Milford Buccaneers, it’s actually kind of fun to tie it into the program.”

The “Buccaneer boat” — that’s the working name right now, but the district plans to open that up to input — is part of Educational Passages, a nonprofit dedicated to ocean and environmental education. The organization runs the Miniboat Program, where students are able to prepare and deploy a miniboat. Each 5-foot-long unmanned boat has a satellite transmitter, so it can be tracked as it sails around the ocean. Miniboats at sea right now are approaching the West Coast of the States from Japan, snaking across the Pacific Ocean. Boats that departed from the East Coast dot the Atlantic. All are viewable online, with their most recent coordinates posted.

The hope is to have students across the grade levels participating in the boat project, as well as the community. Hertrich Automotive Family donated to the district to support the project, and Milford plans to work with local waterways and corresponding organizations, as well as

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will assist with tracking, Dr. Amory said.

“There’s endless possibilities where it’s hands-on,” said Kate Marvel, supervisor of secondary student learning. “I think we’re hopefully going to come out of a year where we’ve done a lot virtually and — hopefully things are back to normal by next year — we can get kids really hands on and working together and touching and feeling what they’re actually working with.”

Some students will be able to design a website about the project. Others will be part of decorating it — putting the “arts” into STEAM. For all students, it’ll open up a variety of possible career paths they hadn’t been exposed to before.

Then there’s the more conceptual pieces that will connect to students’ educations.

“What makes the boat more successful to float or to go with the current or against the current or whatever we need to do?” Dr. Marvel said. “Really taking those concepts that you talk about and you read through textbooks … but to really put it to use and see, the physical piece of this comes to life.”

Dr. Amory added that there’s so many curricular opportunities for all grade levels.

“We know that we have an incredibly talented staff, and we’re actually really excited about seeing where our staff will be able to take this and help with some of those connections,” she said.

The pandemic has forced the district to have an “about face” with technology, too, she noted.

“This is an opportunity for us to continue to use the technology in a way that just helps extend and reinforce the teaching and learning, and is no longer necessarily crisis teaching and learning,” she said. “We’re really excited about the technological connections that can be made.”

Though the project is still in its early planning phases, the district is interested in including the community too: be that help launching the boat from research vessels or local fishing companies or another option.

Due to supply demands, the boat is slated for a fall launch. It will be prebuilt, which is essentially a shell where school leaders and students will be able to put all of the finishing touches.

Inside the boat, they can place “artifacts” representative of Delaware and Milford School District.

“We’re excited about going through the process of identifying which artifacts we would like to include,” Dr. Amory said. “So should our boat actually make landfall somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, should that happen, we’re really hopeful that we’ll be able to create some connections with our students, along with another community, and hopefully another school as well.”

There’s precedent for that here in Delaware, too.

Lake Forest School District set sail its own boat, The Mighty Spartan, in 2014. In 2015, the boat washed ashore in the village of Strandhill, County Sligo, in the northwest coast of Ireland, where all of the artifacts, tucked inside, were recovered.

A 10-year-old boy, the son of the man who found it, brought it to school. The schools were able to connect their students, said Dr. Amory, who worked with school leadership there on that project.

“We’re really kind of looking at the opportunity to replicate something similar to that,” she said. “We have no idea what direction our boat will actually go. We’ll be using the tides and the currents to be able to track it.”