DEER ISLE — Modern technology is often blamed for a decline in health due to inactive lifestyles, but students at Deer Isle-Stonington High School are using aerobic exercise to recharge their cell phones, iPods and other electronic gadgets.

Along the way, they are discovering how much effort it takes to generate electricity by using their own energy.

Eight students in the Applied Physics class taught by industrial arts teacher Dennis Saindon and science teacher Cindi Heanssler have converted a stationary exercise bicycle into a human-powered electricity generator.

The project was launched with a grant from the Island Institute’s Energy for Me program, which encourages energy education across the curriculum.

At the start of the school year, the students knew the class would focus on electricity, but the project wasn’t defined until Deer Isle residents Holly Mead and Bruce Bulger donated a new exercise bike.

The project’s three-tiered process started with an investigation into basic electricity concepts through classroom discussions, labs and videos.

That led students to adopt a goal of fabricating the exercise bike, now dubbed “energy bike,” into a generator that converts their kinetic energy into electricity.

Information on the website created by class member Abbigail Bray states that the “initial step in any mechanical fabrication project is to produce an accurate mechanical drawing of the object.”

To achieve that goal, each student created two-dimensional drawings of the three-dimensional exercise bike.

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