DELAND -- Five-year-old Samara Cortez is still learning to spell her last name and now she's learning to tap it out using the di-dah-dit sounds of Morse Code.

This week, the kindergartener at Starke Elementary in DeLand also had the chance to talk about Christmas plans and pets with a Horizon Elementary student in Port Orange, using amateur radio.

Samara is one of the "Koala Talkers," named for Starke's school mascot, who are learning about ham radio with the help of volunteers from the Daytona Beach Amateur Radio Association.

Starke, which started the program in November as part of its after-school program, is the third Volusia County school to get involved with the ham radio program. Samsula Academy also participates.

"Our goal is to stimulate young minds," said Doug Hubbs, a DeLand ham radio operator for 31 years who is helping out with the program at Starke. "We're not trying to make ham radio operators out of them. If we do, fine. If not, we've sown the seed of curiosity."

Plenty of those seeds were sown Wednesday as children huddled around Hubbs and volunteers from the Daytona Beach club to practice Morse Code, talk on the radio and learn how robots work.

Until the Koala Talkers program began, third-grader Jordan Roberts didn't know anything about ham radios.

"I've seen a Morse Code thing in a book, one of those tappers," the 9-year-old said, but now he's learning firsthand how it can be used to communicate across the street or around the world.

"Electronics are cool," Jordan said, talking about how communications technology has progressed in recent years. "They didn't have hand-held phones. They had to plug them into the wall, and now they have this wireless stuff."

For children who've grown up with cell phones, e-mail and the Internet, learning about ham radios is a new experience, said Kathleen Messina, who coordinates Starke's after-school program. "In this age of computers and iPods, they have no idea about this," she said.

Messina and Sharon Lloyd, a Starke kindergarten teacher who's also working with the Koala Talkers, are working on getting their ham radio licenses so they'll eventually be able to supervise the children themselves and possibly get other students involved.

Jahmall Collins, a 6-year-old kindergartener, got his chance to talk to a boy from Horizon this week.

"It's fun to do," Jahmall said. "We talked about brothers and sisters. He said he had 16."

John LoCicero, a retired tugboat captain who's president of the Daytona Beach Amateur Radio Association, said the children are learning as well as having fun. The program -- sponsored nationally by the American Radio Relay League -- exposes them to electronics, science, math, robotics and even geography as they mark on a map the location of people they contact by radio.

While it's not the primary goal, Hubbs hopes some children may end up as ham-radio operators, bringing another generation into a worldwide fraternity that promotes friendship and helps with emergency communications during emergencies.

"The ham-radio community is aging faster than the calendar," Hubbs said, with the average age of amateur radio operators increasing about 1.3 years every 12 months. "We're already dinosaurs."

linda.trimble@news-jrnl.com

2009.12.17