Get in Gear Girl Scout Workshop
Los Angeles Section

The Get in Gear ’99 workshop was held April 17,1999 with great success. The event was located at the Southern California Gas Company Energy Resource Center in Downey. This facility offered the perfect combination of open space, meeting rooms, computer lab and energy efficiency displays.

The Get in Gear workshop was designed for and offered to junior Girl Scouts. Registration forms were distributed through the local Girl Scouts councils. Over 1000 local troops received flyers announcing the event. Registration signups were handled by SWE-LA and filled up one week after the announcement. The workshop pre-registration included 229 scouts and 67 leaders from 19 Southern California Girl Scout Troops. There were over 400 scouts and leaders who were turned away due to space limitations. On the day of the event 127 scouts and 39 leaders attended from 18 troops. Feedback received from all participants was extremely positive. The low turnout was unfortunate due to the number of people we turned away. However, it was stated in the confirmation letters sent to the leaders that there was a waiting list and to please call if their numbers dropped.

The event ran very smoothly. Thirty SWE-LA volunteers facilitated the activities. The workshop was kicked off with a presentation titled "Engineering Barbie," by Judy Daley from Mattel. After the presentation the Girl Scouts rotated through seven activity sessions. The activity sessions were as follows:

1. Mad Scientists Lab: Chromatography experiment
2. Cyberscouts: Built personal web pages and posted them on the SWE-LA site
3. The Airport: Learned about the bernoulli effect and built and tested paper airplanes
4. Water Works: Built tin foil boats and learned about the water filtration process
5. Machine Shop: Learned about simple machines and built mobiles
6. Robot Zone: Saw a demonstration and learned to verbally command a robot
7. Energy Tour: Toured the Energy Resource Center to learn about energy efficiency

The girls rated the activities at the end of the day. The results were varied with all activities receiving both high and low "marks" by participating scouts. At the end of the day each girl received a certificate of participation and patch to sew onto their patch vest. This patch design is show below and publicizes the Society of Women Engineers.

The purpose of the workshop was to expose girls to the field of engineering and encourage them to consider a career in science or engineering. All scouts filled out a survey before and after the workshop. The results are listed below and show that overall the day was extremely successful in educating girls about engineering careers.

• Charge a minimal fee per person or a troop deposit to limit the number of no shows.
• Serve simple food (ie. cheese pizza, salad, and chocolate chip cookies for a snack)
• Volunteers wearing same-color T shirts worked well for fast identification
• Volunteer support is the essential ingredient!