Though they were cloistered away in a cool barn, four students from Wareham Middle School’s STEAM program played a significant part in the 12th annual Cranberry Festival in mid-October.

Mollie Johnson, Jason Klemp, and Bryan Gallagher went before the School Committee Wednesday night to give a small, informal presentation about what they had learned and done at the festival. Another student, Matthew Mota, also manned the booth with the three, but was unable to be at the meeting. All belong to the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Humanities, and Mathematics program, known as STEAM, at the Middle School.

“I got to talk to a group from New Zealand,” Johnson said. “They got to learn a bit of our culture, and I got to learn theirs.”

“It was pretty cool, because some people had never seen a cranberry before,” Klemp said.

The four students have helped to tend the cranberry bogs growing behind the Middle School, and have learned about the cranberry industry in the process. The three booths they minded at the festival was a booth of nature photography created by the late Bob Conway. Conway’s sister Claire Smith said she decided to reach out to the STEAM program for assistance, due to the fact she couldn't be at all three booths at once during the festival.

Smith and her daughter Dawna Gauvin said the Committee “should be very very proud” of the students.

“When [Gauvin] found me [after the festival], she came running up to me with this big grin out to here to tell me the students were awesome,” Smith said.

Gauvin said she was pleasantly surprised by the four students, and their knowledge of the cranberry industry.

“They each found their own little group, and they each talked about something I … said about each photo, and each added something of their own,” Gauvin said. “They just blossomed. I was so proud of them. … It made all the hard work worth it.”