The annual North Carolina Potato Festival is still months away, but 13 young students got a head start Saturday in a lab at Elizabeth City State University.

Call it tater technology if you will, but Port Discover sponsored the program for students between the ages of 9 and 12 years old at the Jenkins Science Center.

Using tweezers and a sterile scalpel, the students cut off tiny pieces of a potato plant smaller than a grain of rice.

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By May 19, the day of the festival, the plants will have grown into identical clones of the original plant, and the potato will be about the size of a penny.

Dr. Margaret Young, associate professor of biology at ECSU, worked with the younger students with help from some of her students.

“It’s always good to see the usefulness of something you’re learning,” Young said.

The work didn’t end Saturday. The little lab experiments will be on display at Port Discover on Main Street. The students are to revisit their experiments once every two weeks to monitor the progress.

Potatoes will reproduce simply by cutting them in pieces and sticking them back in the ground. The lab version, because it uses a sterile media similar to Jell-O, provides an exact genetic copy of the original. That’s important in tracing the genes in the plant and producing others for testing.

“This was to teach them different ways to propagate plants and give them some hands-on real lab experience,” Michelle Donahue, director of education and exhibits. “A lot of kids have never been to a lab. Hopefully they will start thinking about how things are done.”

Donahue explains that the students are able to expand their scientific experience beyond what she might have had available to her at that age. This experience, she points out, gives them a chance to taste the world of science first hand and hopefully establish an interest in the future.

“What they were gathering was the a leaf and part of the stem,” Donohue said. “That contains the key genetic piece and by getting that you get exactly enough information to form a new plant.

“If you had a plant with traits you really wanted to duplicate, this is the way you would do it in the lab. And by doing it, the kids got a chance to learn a new vocabulary and get some lab experience. I know I never got to see anything like this until after I was in high school.”

“This was really cool,” said Emily York a student at River Road Middle School.