This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Ogden • When Naomi Anson was a kid, she constantly was told girls weren't good at math. The phrase was uttered so frequently, she said, that she started to believe it.
But she refuses to let that mantra govern the life of her daughter, Abigail.
"I want to make sure she can do everything she wants to do, including math and science," Anson said Saturday at Weber State University.
Anson and Abigail, who is 11, attended Weber State's sixth annual Parent-Daughter Engineering Day on Saturday, where a group of about 50 took part in activities meant to expose young girls to engineering. The school also hosted an event on Friday.
This was the second year Abigail, a seventh grader at Quest Academy in West Haven, attended the event.
She has always liked science and math and said she wants to be an engineer so she can "build medicine for sick animals."
The event was led by Celeste Baine, founder and director of the Engineering Education Service Center, which provides resources for K-12 schools to help teach engineering.
"I believe engineering is the best education you can get," Baine told the group Saturday. "It will help you in everything you do for the rest of your life."
The event was open to girls in seventh through 12th grades. They built several systems out of household items, including straws, Popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.
One system was a catapult device called a "flipper." The goal was to flip a marshmallow off a spoon and into a plastic bin two meters away. Parent-daughter teams had about 30 minutes to complete the challenge.
Amber Poperszky, 13, didn't need those 30 minutes. She whizzed through her flipper and was launching marshmallows into a plastic bin before the time was up. When asked about her interest in science and math, Poperszky quipped about "falling in love with robotics at age 8."
But her dream of being a biomedical engineer — so she can help people, she said — began when she attended her first Parent-Daughter Engineering Day a few years ago.
"I liked the way I felt after being successful [at building something] and seeing how it worked was cool," she said, noting the challenge of building systems with a limited amount of supplies.
Sidney Bair's enthusiasm for engineering also is related to her love of building things. But for this 12-year-old, those things happen to be Lego creations. She builds houses, cars, airplanes, spaceships; just about anything you can think of, she said.
Her dad, Chris, works in sales and said he wholeheartedly supports Sidney's love for math, which is why they've attended the event before.
Watching parents interact with their kids in this setting is one of the coolest parts of the event, said Dana Dellinger, director of the university's Center for Technology Outreach.
And she said she hopes the event will help encourage young girls to consider well-paying careers in technology and engineering.
"We love offering girls and their parents an opportunity to do some fun and engaging engineering-related problem solving together," Dellinger said. "It is often eye-opening and exciting for parents to see how their daughter thinks through problems."
Twitter alexdstuckey