Print edition: 
Anybody who says that only boys can be engineers might have had a fight on their hands Saturday.
Girls were everywhere at the Engineering Expo, put on by the local Society of Women Engineers for elementary and middle school-age children.
Mika Lister was there with her daughters, 9-year-old Harmony and 8-year-old Symphony, who were holding bags of slime, a polymer they made from white glue and borax.
While Symphony said she was more interested in becoming a veterinarian, Harmony declared that she liked engineering:
“I like building stuff,” she said.
Both agreed fiercely that girls could be engineers just like boys.
“Girls can be smart, too, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a girl or a boy if you want to be an engineer,” Symphony said.
There were plenty of boys there as well.
Barbara Davis, the group’s outreach coordinator, said her group wants to encourage girls to become engineers. But really, she said, it’s interested in getting more engineers, period.
If that was the goal, they got a good start. The gym at Spirit AeroSystems’ HR Service Center swarmed with parents and kids moving from station to station, building bridges and watching how rockets are fired. It was all very hands-on.
“It’s important that it not feel like school,” Davis said. “They need to know that engineering involves some pretty cool stuff.”
That pretty much describes the homemade system that retired engineer James Whitfield built to carry spoken conversations across a light beam.
“You know how you talk to each other using two tin cans connected with string? Well, think of it as a high-tech tin can,” he said to the fascinated dads and their pretty interested kids.
The system, built with relatively inexpensive electronics, a few lenses and PVC pipe, was a telephone that turned sound waves into electrical signals and electrical signals into light signals. Those signals were beamed about 40 feet away to a light reader and turned back into sound.
Many of the parents were engineers trying to show their children the fun and magic of what they do all day.
Shawn May is an engineer at Cessna Aircraft’s lab for experimental advanced design. Basically he helps build the airplanes of the future.
“I like that it’s hands-on so that kids in middle school can appreciate it,” he said.
He brought his sons, 12-year-olds Caleb Riley and Brody May. Both said they liked that the activities demonstrate real scientific and engineering principles.
“I liked the power circuits,” Brody said.
“I liked putting things together and making them run,” Caleb said.
