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Room 711. A faint scraping sound can be heard in Mary Kate Brown's sixth- grade social studies classroom. The students are on a dig. Each group of three or four has been assigned a plot within an ancient Assyrian site. Their mission: to uncover what is at the site, to analyze carefully each artifact they find, then to formulate and defend a thesis about the nature of the place and the people who once lived there. Not even well-heeled Dalton can afford to take an entire class on an excavation in the Middle East, so these students are working on Archaeotype, a computer simulation of a dig -- shoveling sounds and all -- created at Dalton and based on an actual site. Still, the excitement of the hunt is palpable. As they uncover spearheads and ivory pieces on the screen, these 11- year-olds speak of ``stratification'' and ``in situ artifacts'' with near professional fluency. This is a course in which kids learn by doing -- absorbing science and ancient history through acts of discovery. ``The material they find will admit of a variety of explanations,'' says Brown. ``There is not just one right answer.'' To marshal evidence for their theories, students may consult Archaeotype's six online ``libraries'' of scholarly information and images (military, religious, royalty, etc.) as well as the greater resources of Dalton's library or even the Assyrian collection at the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art. ``It was like our own little land inside the computer,'' says Laura Zuckerwise, 12, who completed the course last year. ``If we found a new artifact, it was as though we were the first people to discover it!'' Room 608. Like generations before them, the students in Jacqueline D'Aiutolo's 10th-grade English class have begun the epic journey into the dark heart of Shakespeare's Macbeth. They have completed reading the play, and now, working in groups of three or four, they are digging deeper into the text. Each group sits before a Macintosh computer, linked to an elaborate data base. Three students have been exploring the character of Lady Macbeth for a joint paper. What does she look like? How should she be imagined? A few keystrokes bring up a series of images: illustrations of the conniving noblewoman by a variety of artists, then a scene from Roman Polanski's 1971 film, Macbeth. As the action plays out in a window on the screen, the students discuss the lady's greed and her striking resemblance to a witch in the opening scene of Polanski's film. They can also look at scenes from the 1948 Orson Welles production and a 1988 staging for British TV. As they form theories about Shakespeare's intentions, they may consult any of 40 essays and hundreds of annotated bibliographies, as well as writings about the Bard's life and times. Jacqui D'Aiutolo circles the room as her students work. She has been teaching Macbeth for more than 15 years and, though she first regarded computers and literature as ``strange bedfellows,'' she has been amazed to see how students can deploy this modern tool to plumb the meaning of old texts. She has found that her own role has changed: she is less a lecturer than a resource and guide, helping students refine their own questions and assisting in their search for answers. The incisiveness of their work has stunned her. Says D'Aiutolo: ``You have depths you would never expect to reach in a 10th-grade class.''