Kyle Brown used a nail gun as he and other Greater Altoona Career and Technology students worked on a house on Harrison Avenue Monday.

It’s the sixth house the school has built as part of its building trades project.

Students from masonry; carpentry; plumbing/heating, ventilation and air conditioning; electricity; electronics; drafting; interior design; and cabinet making work on the project, carpentry instructor Art Albright said.

“I love it. This is the greatest experience I’ve ever had,” said Kyle, an Altoona senior. “This is what I’m going to be doing in life. It’s how school should be.”

Albright’s students built the walls in class and put in the floors. This week they are trying to get partitions in place.

They’ve built everything so far for the three-bedroom, two- bathroom house except the foundation, Albright said.

They have guidance, but it’s a student project. They virtually do all of the work.

The students out there all like what they are doing.

“It’s hands-on learning compared to being in the classroom,” Hollidaysburg senior Mark Swan said.

The students agreed that building the house instead of learning about it in the classroom is much better. They think it will make them more prepared for the job market.

“The best way to do it is hands-on,” Altoona senior Scott Grabill said.

The first two years, they didn’t get a lot of hands-on training about building a house, Bishop Guilfoyle senior Vince Durbin said. Instead, they worked on small projects.

Now, they get to do the real deal.

“We’re getting out and doing it,” he said. “It’s fun.”

Brett Walter explained to one student how to hold the tape measure correctly as they were building a door frame.

“It’s a great learning experience,” the Altoona senior said. “Just that I’m out here building a house is pretty amazing.”

Most students working on the house are juniors and seniors, Albright said.

However, he brings over sophomores to see things they may not see when they work on the next house.

He brought them over to see the flooring system because it’s the newest in the industry. By the time they work on the house, the flooring will be complete.

So if they don’t see it now, they may not get to see it by the time they graduate, he said.

Right now, they are most concerned about getting the house under roof before the weather turns cold, center Executive Director Lanny Ross said.

The project began last spring when masonry students built the foundation.

Ross hopes the home is completed during the 2007-08 school year. Students spend two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon working on the house.

The first four houses were built in a year. The houses on Harrison Avenue will take two years to complete because students no longer work in the summer and because it takes longer to transport them to the site than when they worked on Fourth Avenue, he said.

When the houses are sold, all the money is returned to the building construction programs, Ross said.

The school bought a four-door Ford pickup truck for the programs with part of the proceeds from the last sale, he said.