Women in Engineering Girl Scout Saturday.

Once a month, the Women in Engineering Program hosts a Girl Scout Saturday. Girls travel from all over the state to earn a badge in one of our workshops. There were about 50 Women Engineers and 60 Girl Scouts.

The theme this month is "Humans and Habitats." Traditionally, this is a life sciences badge, but we put an engineering twist on it. The troops were given one of eight states; Montana, Pennsylvania, Arizona, California, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, or Tennesee, and had to design a house that was functional in that climate.

Our troop was given Pennsylvania.

They had a half hour to design and build a model home for their state. My troop gave their house a large sloping roof to let the rain and slow slide off, a garage to keep the car in when it snows outside, a pond and garden in the back, two levels for seasonal temperature control, and solar panels for energy efficiency. I was pretty proud of those girls; they were the only ones to think of putting solar panels on the house.

The girls went CRAZY building their model. We had limitless supplies of everything... unfortunately. I ended up going to work with glue all up my arm. I don't know how this happened, because I didn't even touch anything. My job was to keep the project moving so they would finish on time.

I got a good chance to talk to some of the girls about pretty much everything from school, to family, to girl scouts, to interests. Here, Courtney is putting the garden together while she tells me about some of the foods she likes to eat.

Those little silver patches on the roof are solar panels.

For only having a half hour, all the troops had really extravagant houses. Granted, they all had about ten little girls working away the whole time to get these finished. After spending that much time in a small room with 100 people moving around, it was ungodly hot in there. The girls didn't mind at all, though. They had a lot of fun.

This was a really fun activity for me, too. I do hope I get to participate in a lot more of these Girl Scout Saturdays.