INUVIK
Girls just wanna have fun, and this summer, that fun was all about science.

Kyla Hvatum, left, and Nicole Collison have spent the summer creating digital maps of the Inuvik Satellite Station Facility and parts of the community. - Sarah Ladik/NNSL photo

"It introduced me to a whole new field of science," said federal government summer student Nicole Collison. "And it made me interested in a career in geomatics."

Over the school break, Kyla Hvatum and Collison were employed through a federal program seeking to get indigenous women into STEM programs (science, technology, engineering, and math) after high school. With four projects across the three territories, Inuvik's focused on geomatics and getting people excited about the Inuvik Satellite Station Facility.

"Before this, I never wanted to go near geography," said Hvatum. "Now it's really interesting."

Geomatics is really just a fancy word for anything that has to do with maps, which are all created on computers and have a lot more data than the cardinal points of the compass. The project the women are working towards this summer is more of a slideshow with all kinds of information about the satellite facility, as well as some interesting points in Inuvik.

"People all over the world, all across Canada, are using them," said Laura Salisbury, a geomatics officer with Natural Resources Canada and the lead person on the project. "They're used for research, earth observation, planning and land use, all kinds of things."

Much of what Hvatum and Collison learned had to do with data manipulation and the computer programs used to do it, something neither were familiar with before. They found out about it from their science teacher, Adam Wright, as well as from Matt Dares, head of the robotics club, of which Collision is a member.

"He told us we'd be researching things to do with mapping, and it sounded pretty cool," said Hvatum.

As a fun way of working with the data, the project also involves the creation of a Minecraft world replica of the satellite facility and its surroundings, something Collision said was much harder to create than she had anticipated.

While Salisbury returned to Ottawa last week, Hvatum and Collison will continue their work this month, hopefully producing something ready to be shared with the public in the future.

"You don't realize how much geomatics is involved in our daily lives," Collison said. "There are going to be a lot of career opportunities at the station, and they want people in Inuvik to be trained in all kinds of things for those careers."

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