PORTSMOUTH
Brooke Whitely and Justine LaBonte, seventh graders at the Gaudet Middle School in Middletown, spent part of their morning yesterday pretending to be Navy submariners sending out sound waves to get bearings on other nearby vessels.
"It's fun," Brooke said.
Fallon Manley learned enough about electronic circuitry to put together a working buzzer.
"It was exciting," she said. "You had to put everything together and work with your hands and your mind."
Amanda Stuckey and Laureen O'Connor saw the way sound waves can vibrate string, on the one hand, and a panel of plastic wrap, on the other.
Amanda said, "We turned the knob all the way, and the string and the Saran Wrap were vibrating so much you couldn't see them. You could just feel them."
She pronounced the experience "neat."
These girls were among 60 seventh graders from Gaudet who spent the day at Raytheon as guests of that company, a major defense contractor, and the American Association of University Women at an annual conference intended to encourage girls to pursue careers in math and the sciences.
Only 20 percent of young women who enter college enter those fields, according to Judy Terry, president of the Rhode Island Chapter of the AAUP.
She and Sue Erwin, a Raytheon engineer who is also president of the AAUP's Newport County chapter, said the annual math and science conference for girls aims at raising that percentage.
This year, the math and science conference inevitably serves as a response to remarks made in January by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers.
Summers invited a hailstorm of criticism when he suggested that the paucity of women in technical careers might stem from a lack of aptitude in math and the sciences.
Terry said one major obstacle is that girls do not receive the same encouragement as boys.
The girls, wearing T-shirts with the logo "Math + Science+ Gaudet Girls = Success," moved among four different workshops that enabled them to make connections between the classes they take and real-life applications involving electricity, navigation, acoustics and land conservation.
The exercise in navigation revolved around a variation on a children's game called "Marco Polo," a swimming-pool version of hide and seek in which the child who is "it" must search for his prey with eyes closed.
In this case, two seventh grade submariners searching for other vessels in the sea stood with their eyes closed facing due north on a huge compass taped to the carpet in a lecture hall.
They sent out a sonar "ping" by shouting "Marco!" while pairs other pairs of girls positioned at various points of the compass responded, sending the "ping" back by yelling "Polo!."
All the while, Raytheon engineer Kerri Tracy sat in a corner, operating a computer that picked up the positions of the various ships -- named after rock stars like Usher, Ashlee Simpson, and Simple Plan - and projected them onto a screen that covered an entire wall in the room .
Usher, for example, was located at 30 degrees from "Marco," and Ashlee Simpson was found at 225 degrees from "Marco."
As they guided the girls through the game, the Raytheon engineers who ran the workshop, Tracy, Christine Domingos, and Lisa Aldrich, built in a basic lesson on the principles of navigation, using the compass and a circle as tools to get the bearings on other ships.
And they added a farewell note to the packet of papers the girls accumulated during the day.
"If you liked Marco," the note said, "you should take courses in algebra, calculus, geometry, trigonometry and computer information systems."
The visibility of Raytheon's women engineers at yesterday's conference invited questions from the middle schoolers.
And there were plenty, said Patience Allen, a software engineer who chaperoned one group of 15 girls from one workshop to another.
When the girls asked her to explain what she does, Allen said, she linked her work to terms they could understand -- building Web pages.
Some of the girls are learning to build Web pages using a particular computer language, Allen said, and she explained that she uses a different computer language in her work.
Allen, who had to assert herself as the only girl in math and science classes at a rural high school in northern Maine, said she encouraged her young charges to keep up their confidence.
"Don't be afraid to ask lots of questions," she said she told them.
Among the adults who organized or participated in the conference, there was no shortage of horror stories on the way girls and young women have been treated in math and science classes.
Christina Erwin, 28, a second-generation Raytheon engineer and the daughter of Sue Erwin, said she never felt any pressure against her math or engineering studies, but she said she counts herself "fortunate."
Her mother's first career was teaching chemistry, she said, and she had supportive teachers at Bishop Connolly High School in Fall River and at Bryn Mawr, an all-girls' college near Philadelphia.
Cathy Speer, an AAUW official who returned to school to get an engineering degree in the early 1990s, said one professor asked her point-blank, in front of the rest of her class, "what do you think you're doing here?"
Judy Paolucci said that as a doctoral student, she got "the implicit message" that "I would have to choose between a family or science."
Paolucci, the luncheon keynote speaker, wrote her doctoral thesis on girls in math and science education.
She urged Gaudet's seventh graders to keep their options open by taking as much science and math as they could.
Now assistant superintendent of schools in Narragansett, Paolucci said in an interview that she has noticed differences in attitudes of girls and boys toward math and science, regardless of ability.
Girls who get A's in math and science often say, "I'm not that good," while boys who are "barely getting a B" say "I'm going to be an engineer," she said.
Terry, meanwhile, said the best way to counter such attitudes is with events like yesterday's conference.
The nation's economy needs girls as well as boys to pursue math and the sciences, she said, "before all the jobs are outsourced to India."
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