ATTLEBORO  -- Ten-year-old Savanna Nelson said she thinks computer animation is "cool" and something she wouldn’t mind exploring.

Nicole Choiniere, 11, a fellow student at Community School in North Attleboro, said she really liked hearing a woman’s story about her career as an engineer working on radar in connection with space and her friend, a female astronaut.

Katherine Pariseau, a freshman at Bishop Feehan, is pondering engineering as a career, possibly computer or mechanical engineering.

The young women were among roughly 40 people — about half of them girls — to attend the "Envision Engineering" forum last week at the Women At Work Museum on Country Street.

Sponsored by the IEEE Foundation, it featured a half-dozen female panelists who talked about their careers in engineering.

The panelists encouraged girls, and the parents of girls, not to be deterred from engineering, even if the field is still largely dominated by men.

Here are snippets of the stories panelists shared with the audience:

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Beth Wilson said she knew she wanted to be an engineer at 9-years-old, right after she saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Born with a hearing impairment, she posed a question to her mother after watching the event on television: "Why is it easier to go to the moon than to make me a hearing aid?"

Her mother’s response: "It’s easier to make you a hearing aid, but the scientists who could work on it are more interested in the moon."

"That’s when I decided I would be an engineer," said Wilson, now 47, who has worked for Raytheon for the past 25 years as a design engineer, program manager, research scientist, manager and test director on sonar, satellite and radar programs.

Ironically, her career would eventually connect to space and NASA.

Preparing to graduate high school, she and a friend shared their college goals. She wanted to be an engineer, her friend, an astronaut.

Wilson doubted her friend’s chances because she was "so short" and NASA had a rule regarding height. Her friend’s reply: "I’ll make them change it." And she did.

"She’s been up (in space) three times," Wilson said. On a recent space mission, Wilson worked from the ground, using radar to, among other things, scan for "space junk." Her friend was the shuttle pilot. When another astronaut on the mission dropped a wrench, Wilson’s radar detected it. She e-mailed her friend, "Found your wrench."

Aside from her work with NASA, Wilson has rigged her house so that her lights flash to indicate the telephone is ringing since she can’t hear it. She keeps a small toy astronaut on her desk. She said it reminds her "there are no barriers."

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Kathleen Morris comes from a family of engineers and inventors — they just happened to all be males. The women were dressmakers. So, Morris made ball gowns.

After an unglamorous high school career, followed by a stint in a shoe-making factory, she decided she wanted to go to engineering school "to make machines to make ball gowns."

Morris, 56, is now owner of The Carpenter Aunt, designing and building furniture and built-ins. Her career has also included building some of the first computerized equipment for assembly lines and writing software to run machines like time-clocks and electron microscopes. She and a friend also started a business building test equipment for companies like Ford and General Electric. She was the first female in her family to graduate high school and go to college. Her daughter is now an engineer, too.

To illustrate the importance of engineering, she unraveled the history of the hanger. Early clothes went on shelves, she said. They "weighed a ton" and would have broken hangers if they existed. Displaying a long-trained, cream-colored wedding gown dating to the 1830s, Morris said those dresses at the time would also have required tall closets.

"We didn’t have closets until we had hangers," she said. "... Women had to be engineers to fit dresses on hangers."

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Allison Bedwinek, 25, was one of the Nerd Girls. The group is actually comprised of female engineering students at Tufts University who "do cool things with renewable energy" in the community, including bringing solar power to a couple of homes and buildings on Thacher Island.

Bedwinek said she initially wanted to go to art school because she wanted to create for "Sesame Street," "but my father wouldn’t pay for art school, so I went for engineering."

She started with robotics, but wasn’t enthralled. She worked at Fisher-Price for two years, "basically ripping the heads off dolls." She now works for Johnson & Johnson designing surgical instruments, or as she described it, "toys for doctors."

Bedwinek started with general tools and has now moved on to those used in neurosurgery, like a small drill used to create a hole in the skull without injuring the brain. Her next project is working on implants for the brain.

After a less than stunning performance on a high school report card that included an F in biology, Bedwinek said she got "straight As" in engineering-related classes.

"Find the one thing you do like" and pursue it, she said.

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Karen Panetta, 37, as associate professor of electric engineering at Tufts, is working on a Nerd Girls project aimed at breaking the stigmas and stereotypes of women in engineering. She teaches core computer engineering courses and works on the multimedia curriculum at the college.

But the real reason she became an engineer, she said, was "because I like shopping and that costs a lot of money." When she was younger, her father told her she would need a good job to sustain her passion.

She’s a computer engineer by trade and in the past worked for NASA, helping to create a data visualization program for such things as pollutants in the atmosphere and the formation of hurricanes. Her students in her animation course translate math and science equations "to make imaginative stuff come to life" on screen.

"The biggest thing you need is a great imagination," Panetta said, explaining that it helps make for a well-rounded individual and an engineer.

Nerd Girls are also cheerleaders, marathon runners, athletes and artists. "People always think you need to have the best grades in math and science," she said. "That’s not true. You need to be persistent at what you want to do."

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When Helena Willis, now 51, graduated from high school, no one told her she could go into engineering. She studied biology and got her master’s degree. But then her brother was studying engineering, and she said to herself, "I can do that."

For the past 20 years she has worked for Hasbro and is currently director of engineering for "boys toys" at the company.

Willis said she started at "the bottom rung, designing toys from scratch" as a manufacturing engineer under Kenner, which was eventually bought by Hasbro. She was bolstered as a child by her father, who encouraged her to help with home improvement projects. "I worked on my own car," she recalled.

In those early days as a female engineer, Willis said she "always had to work harder" to prove herself among an all-male engineering department. But she said there’s a big world out there now, including toy engineers who know how to sew and make patterns, electrical engineers who get toys to emit those exciting sounds, and adaptation engineers who translate the songs sung by toys, like the Spider Man doll, into multiple languages. (She displayed a My Little Pony singing in German and a Spider Man singing the movie theme song in Spanish).

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Carolyn Duby, 40, noted that she was one of at least three women on the panel who were "fellows," which she defined as "just a high level technical name."

Duby is a fellow with Pathfinder Solutions and a consultant to teams of software developers who use a technique called Model Driven Architecture. She worked on medical applications, such as a blood analyzer, and is now working on a project that involves a big destroyer "to keep women in the armed forces safe."

She started college in pre-med, but then decided she should really learn computers. Duby described the computer science field as a "boys club" with very few women.

"But you do something you love," she said. "You have to work beyond it."

SUSAN LaHOUD can be reached at 508-236-0398 or at slahoud@thesunchronicle.com.