It's a little after 7 a.m. and 14-year-old Matthew Thomas is sitting at a beige desk, trying to "climb inside" the mind of a female suicide bomber.

"I can't believe it, that people would do such a thing. I, I, I just ... "

"People do strange things," his classmate Mike Vietor said.

"I wonder if people ever thought about that, if God created them just to do that," Matthew responded.

It was first period on a Friday at Meade High School and Mike, Matt and 14 classmates were in Tina Edler's Homeland Security Explorations class, a part of the Homeland Security Signature Program that is new to the school this...