The Jim Thorpe High School hosted its second year JT Talks Friday where a panel of four recent graduate alumni presented various topics between first and last period.

Haley Cope spoke to students about the benefits of using Google as a main search engine while Cynthia Williams spoke about life in pre-med at Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine.The highlight of the day came when MIT graduate Christian Ferko headed up an educational live-action role playing game he designed called "Outbreak.""It took three all-nighters to come up with it," he said.The mission was simple: to save the human race from Bloodfire, a mysterious disease that had wiped out over 90 percent of the population around the world. Students acted as leading scientists to find a cure for the pandemic. The 42 freshmen to senior students who signed up to play the game were divided into four teams."If you don't succeed in your tasks today, it means the end of humanity," Ferko told the groups."We used logical thinking and analyzed the data," senior Sheyenne Davidson said.According to Ferko, Bloodfire is based on real-world diseases."It's a prion. Most infectious agencies are living things in the body which then create toxins. Prions have the ability to corrupt healthy proteins in the body."The most commonly known example of a prion is mad cow disease. Students used real techniques such as genetic snippets and genomics, the study of genes, to find the cure and stop the spread of the deadly disease."Overall, based on the decisions made in your groups, you were able to develop a cure and save a remaining 5 percent of the population. It's very good. I'm impressed."Gifted support teacher Melanie Mauro helped coordinate the talks both this year and last."It was open to students in all grades," she said. "Last year we emailed the teachers and they brought their classes down. But this year we target kids who seemed interested in the topics. There's a learning curve since it's only the second year."This was the first time an interactive activity had been included in the talks."It's better that it was a smaller group because they have to work together on their tasks," Ferko said.At the completion of the game, students gave Ferko an overall thumbs-up for the activity."We sent out a survey after we did the talks last year and heard back from 84 students. They said they wanted a more interactive talk," Ferko said of developing the game. "I was worried they would think it was boring work sheets. But they cared about it a whole lot and their answers were very thought out."The idea for the JT Talks came about two years ago when a group of Jim Thorpe alumni were having a conversation during a party."We were talking about all of the things we wish we had known in high school. There's so much out there that we never heard about, if only we could tell our former selves what engineers really do, or what we should learn to succeed as a scientist, or what college is like," Ferko said.The JT Talks program began the next school year with a mission to share experiences and accumulated knowledge with current students.