Students at St. Patrick’s Community School got to hold pig hearts in the palm of their hands during a dissection led by a heart expert via videoconferencing.

Around 100 students piled into the St. Patrick’s gym recently and gathered in groups of two to three to dissect 40 pig hearts during the morning.

Dr. Ray Vollmer, a heart specialist who works at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, led the dissection and could see and interact with students throughout the process.

“He traced the route that blood takes as it goes through all chambers of the heart, through all the valves, the aorta and everything,” said Dean Stevens, a Grade 8 teacher at the school. “So he took them on an internal tour of the direction that the blood goes and where it goes and how it goes through a pig heart, which is anatomically very similar to a human heart.”

Vollmer spoke to students about damage that can occur to the heart by smoking and having a poor diet, showing examples of hearts that belonged to people who had hardening of the arteries, who had died of a heart attack and had bypass surgery after the coronary artery was clogged.

“It’s tremendously powerful for that,” Stevens said. He said the lesson connected not only the science curriculum, but also the health curriculum, showing students things they can do to keep themselves healthy.

“This is why it’s such an opportunity. We could have done a pig dissection in class, but it’s not the same,” Stevens said. “The experience that our kids got was just amazing.”

Candice Morse, 13, was one of the students who took part. She said the heart didn’t look anything like she expected it would.

“When we cut it open the last time, it kind of looked like a jungle with a whole bunch of vines coming down,” Morse said. It was the first time she got to see inside a pig’s heart and all of its chambers.

“It makes me want to do more stuff like that,” Morse said. “Everybody was pretty much into it.”

Joel Liwanag, 13, said the pig hearts were about the size of a person’s fist and they got to learn about all of the ventricles and chambers in the heart.

“It was cool,” Liwanag said.

Stevens said the technology they have access to in the Red Deer Catholic Regional School Division offers endless learning opportunities for students.

“When we do things like we did today, we give kids here in Red Deer opportunities that we never had growing up and we don’t have to leave the city,” Stevens said.

sobrien@reddeeradvocate.com