Senior Michelle Maldonado and sophomore Moriah Jones dig into their cookie mine during Paula Ladd’s AP Environmental Science class. Each student was given a set budget to purchase their mine — a chocolate-chip cookie — and equipment, tweezers and toothpicks. They were then given five minutes to extract each chocolate chip from the cookie. “It was actually really difficult because our cookie crumbled and we didn’t have good mining tools,” Maldonado said. The lab was designed to demonstrate how mining could damage the environment which is difficult to restore it to its natural form. The students learned how fragile the environment is and how careful the population must be.