The Petersburg Girls Scouts enjoyed a day long STEM workshop at the Sons of Norway Hall lead by Kelly Fitzgerald of the Alaska Girl Scout Council. The girls rotated through four sections on: engineering, ecology, ornithology and seismology.
Susan Harai, a professional engineer licensed in the State of Alaska, lead the engineering project which was a geodesic dome made of newspaper triangles. The triangles are the strongest structure shape and are used throughout building trusses and bridges. The girls built the dome then further added to the structure to turn it into a flying horse with wings and named it “Pegasus”.
Girl Scouts worked as aquatic ecologists with Joni Johnson, USFS Botanist. The girls used sampling tools to collect water and plankton from the Hammer Slough bridge. They performed a chemical test to measure dissolved oxygen; the titrations and color changes made some girls comment that chemistry is “cool.”
Lynda Jones Outdoor Environmental Education & Outreach Intern from Girl Scouts of Alaska led a bird beak adaptation session with the girls. The girls learned how birds have adapted to their environment with different shaped beaks to gather different types of foods. Everyday tools such as tongs, tweezers, chopsticks and straws represented bird beaks from herons, warblers, sandpipers and hummingbirds, discovering how bird beaks work and how birds gather their food.
Sunny Rice from the Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program led the girls in an activity to understand plate tectonics, volcanoes and mountain building using whipped cream and graham crackers. They learned about how the movement of lithospheric plates, combined with erosion, shapes the world we see around us.
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