WASHINGTON DC — The 14th annual Introduce A Girl To Engineering Day returns Feb. 26 with the theme "There’s a Little Bit of Engineer in Every Girl" and the hashtag #BringItOut.
Each year, the day is packed with workshops, lab tours, on-line discussions and interactive, hands-on activities at businesses, universities, libraries and other venues across the country, providing engagement and mentoring to as many as one million girls. Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day is one of the tent pole events that make up Engineers Week, Feb. 22-28.
This year, Girl Day soars to another level, with a Capitol Hill briefing that is open to lawmakers, non-profits and corporations. Hosted by Representative Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.), speakers include representatives from American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Texas, Austin, which has more than 4,000 girls registered for its upcoming Girl Day event.
The briefing introduces #BringItOut, the new video-driven social media campaign that is a call to action for adult influencers to channel and optimize the awesome potential between girls and engineering.
The #BringItOut video campaign, featuring leading women engineering professionals delivering personal messages about their experiences in the field, is centered on five messages, including:
• Curiosity
• Creativity
• Teamwork
• Finding Opportunities
• Helping Others
Some of the local activities planned for Girl Day, 2015 include:
• Raytheon will partner with non-profits, schools and universities to host 29 community events across 12 states, each designed to help inspire students to seek a future in the science and math professions. On Girl Day, Raytheon will partner with Boys and Girls Clubs of America for events in 16 cities, helping to make girls aware that the path to an engineering career is open to them. The event will include science experiments and talks by role models, many of them female engineers.
• ExxonMobil is bringing 50 girls to its Dallas headquarters to hear from one of its top female engineers and work on two activities (marble roller coaster and marshmallow mania) with ExxonMobil employees. In Clinton, N.J., a group of ExxonMobil volunteers will conduct outreach sessions at eight local schools. They will speak with girls about the exciting opportunities engineering provides and lead them in a variety of activities including puzzles, polymer balls, polymer worms, forensic chromatography and raft rally.
• Rockwell Collins will be hosting Girl Day events at its Cedar Rapids, Iowa headquarters, at offices across the country and at overseas locations in the United Kingdom and Brazil. In Iowa, one-hundred eighth-grade girls will be matched with female engineers. They will attend a speed mentoring session with representatives from different engineering branches, discover that engineering is in fashion, law, and project management, and participate in a prosthetic arm build that will go to a child in need.
• In Bloomfield Hills, M.I., Science with the Engineers, Inc. will host an event in which one-hundred Girls from The Academy of The Sacred Heart will experiment with Newton's first Law and see how engineers have designed the interior of automobiles for safety. They will learn how certain outside forces are designed into the car to keep you safe in an accident.
Major support for Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day 2015 is provided by American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, Bechtel, ExxonMobil Corporation, Motorola Solutions Foundation, Northrop Grumman Foundation, Raytheon Company, Rockwell Collins, Shell Oil Company and TE Connectivity Foundation.
For more information visit www.discovere.org.
