WATERLOO, Iowa (AP) — Students in Wayne Lidtke’s sustainable construction and design class have learned about house building by doing it. They’ve framed walls, hung drywall, installed windows and doors, and done minimal wiring while building small scale houses at the Waterloo Career Center. The students will be working on some other skills, like roofing, in the Waterloo Community Schools’ program before the semester is over, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported .

Though, the nine high schoolers put down their hammers and picked up trowels. Iowa Masonry Institute members taught them lessons on mixing mortar and building a number of structures with cinder block and brick. Their task was to construct a pier. The column-like structure can support a beam in a building, an overhang on an entryway or have a more decorative use at the end of a driveway.

Students shoveled mortar out of wheelbarrows onto plywood platforms. They scooped up the substance with their trowels, depositing it on the edges of a pair of cinder blocks before adding another layer of blocks. Chris Busch, overseeing the students’ efforts, emphasized the importance of getting the right amount of mortar between the blocks. Without the right amount, “it’ll start to lose considerable integrity,” he said.

Students were building the piers five blocks high, and then covering them with a veneer of brick. Busch doesn’t expect everyone in the class to end up as a bricklayer. But bringing the program into schools is important to finding the next generation of workers he says — and the amount of time they’ve had at the career center only helps.