Balloon shreds and balls of masking tape littered the floor at Centennial Hall Saturday morning, and things were just getting started.<\/p>\n
Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, a collaboration between ExxonMobil and Girl Scouts of Alaska, gave girls some hands-on engineering experience, and the results were often messy.<\/p>\n
“This is really fun,” said Cagney Davis, 11, while helping the Navy Team with the group challenge of building a tower using just balloons and tape.<\/p>\n
Different groups of girls employed different strategies. Some made Eiffel Tower-like structures, others made pyramids and some ended up with lumpy piles of balloons clumped together with tape.<\/p>\n
In a few cases, the balloon structures ended up slightly taller than their creators.<\/p>\n
After 5 minutes for planning and 25 minutes to make towers, finished projects were measured, and Erin Sage, risk and safety adviser for ExxonMobil Alaska, talked to the teams.<\/p>\n
“How many people designed the exact balloon tower they made?” Sage asked.<\/p>\n
No hands went up.<\/p>\n
“That’s just like engineering,” Sage said. “We’re always tweaking, We’re engineers, we’re problem solvers.”<\/p>\n
Girls were also introduced to scientific principles via hands-on experiments at six different stations. They were led by mentors, who included engineers and Scouting leaders.<\/p>\n
“It’s fun to learn cool things and see what my dad is learning at his work,” said Clara Neeland, 10, shortly after using air pressure to spray water at a plastic tarp.<\/p>\n
That station taught girls about pressure equilibrium, and also offered girls the chance to displace water from a bottle by blowing into it with a straw and siphon water from one jug to another.<\/p>\n
Other stations gave the 40 girls in attendance hands-on time with personal protective equipment or allowed them to make take-home goodies like a lava lamp made using knowledge of hydrophobic and hydrophilic liquids.<\/p>\n
This is the first year Introduce a Girl to Engineering has come to Juneau. For the past several years, the event has taken place in Anchorage.<\/p>\n
Alaska Commissioner of Education Michael Johnson delivered a keynote address to girls and spoke to them about the importance of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. <\/p>\n
Johnson said the two most important things to STEM are “you and other people.”<\/p>\n
“You make STEM important, STEM doesn’t make you important,” Johnson said.<\/p>\n
He also emphasized the significance of the free STEM event’s Juneau debut.<\/p>\n
“This is incredible,” Johnson said. “It’s you that’s doing the introducing. You’re blazing the trails for all the girls who come after. As a dad of a daughter, I thank you.”<\/p>\n