James and Ollie are the best of friends, but they don't get to see each other very often.
The 10-year-olds live hundreds of kilometres apart on remote cattle stations in central Australia.
The boys are students at Alice Springs School of the Air, but once a term they get a break from their outback classrooms when they and their families flock to Alice Springs for a week of face-to-face learning.
"It's very fun having all my friends around," said James Bayly of Kalabity Station, about 125 kilometres west of Broken Hill.
The mid-term in-school week lets the remote students learn and play together, strengthening their social skills along with their academic knowledge.
Ollie Mckay from Umbeara Station on the South Australian–Northern Territory border, about 250 kilometres south of Alice Springs, was eager to catch up with James and his other mates.
"[The best thing is] playing with them and doing the water play," he said, talking about the activities planned one hot afternoon.
Costs add up quickly
The week of face-to-face learning can be costly.
The Isolated Children's Parent's Association (IPCA) NT president Moira Lanzarin said it could cost families around $2,000 every term for in-school week.
"Not only are they having to drive the distance, and in reality, that can be 500, 600, 700 kilometres one way … a lot of that's on pretty crappy roads, so all you've got to do is blow a four-wheel drive tyre and the prices escalate very quickly," she said.
"If you're an employee, then you have to take time off work to come in. If you're a business owner, then you have to have somebody doing your job back there or covering that.
"If you've got a governess, then you're still paying her wages or his wages during that week that you're bringing them in.
"You have to pay for accommodation for them, yourself, the kids. You've got to feed [everyone] at inflated rates in town, so it starts to add up very quickly."
ICPA held their state conference meeting on Tuesday in Katherine, where a continued push for more funding was on the agenda.
Friends as important as academia
Amanda Brown lives at Narwietooma Station, roughly 150 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, and her daughter Eva attends School of the Air.
She said remote families were easy to forget because they were a small minority of Australia's population, but the ICPA's years of continued advocacy helped families access education.
"You can feel very isolated in the bush and you can feel quite helpless when things aren't quite the way that you'd hoped or intended," Ms Brown said.
"We might be quite small, but we're quite loud and mighty — it's essential that we stand behind what we believe in and support it."
Education lecturer at Charles Darwin University Toni McCallum said giving children opportunities for social and emotional development was essential.
"The development of language, development of turn-taking, ability to get on with your peers and development of inhibitory control, being able to control your emotions, those things are really, really important," Dr McCallum said.
"The academics cannot happen without that — [children] have to have those fundamental skills first.
"If you don't have the socio-emotional skills, if you don't have self-regulation, you can't learn."
Ms Brown agreed, saying, despite the cost, bringing remote families and children together for school was "unbelievably important".
"In my opinion, it's more important on a social side of things that Eva gets to come in here and spend time with other children and other families, [rather] than the actual educating," she said.
"That is how they learn social interaction and what's appropriate, what's not … that's how they build their self-awareness and their self-confidence."
There's still a long way to go to make remote education more affordable and accessible.
But Ollie and James are busy strategising for a different battle, involving water pistols and hoses.
"Just run in and tip the bucket on top of them — put the bucket on their heads, then run away, so they don't know who it is," Ollie said.