That’s What She Said

Lynda K. Hall, professor of psychology, has something to smile about. Her son, Jeremy Boyd, a seventh-grader at Heritage Middle School in Westerville, Ohio, was part of the school’s team that took home first prize in the Future City National Finals Feb. 18-20 in Washington, D.C.

The mission of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition, now in its 16th year, is “to provide a fun and exciting educational engineering program for seventh- and eighth-grade students that combines a stimulating engineering challenge with a ‘hands-on’ application to present their vision of a city of the future.”

Hall said she could not have been more proud of the work her son did on the project.

As a member the Future City team, he worked to put together a simulation of their city with the videogame SimCity 3000, write an essay and an abstract about the city and make a scale model to be presented at the competition. The model had a budget of $100, so most of it was created from recycled materials, Hall said.

Boyd’s team placed their city of the future, RA, in Egypt, an unusual choice among the teams. Most chose well populated areas. Hall said they chose to place it in the desert to “look at how people will adapt.”

The topic for this year’s essay focused on how nanotechnology would be used to monitor the city’s infrastructure.

Their winning essay focused on how this technology would be used to manage their city’s sewer systems.

“The technology would provide RA engineers with precise data, a state-of-the-art monitoring system, automated repairs and precise problem detection that is economically advantageous, protects citizens’ heath and preserves the environment,” the students wrote.

The Future City competition consists of 1,100 middle schools from across the nation. Hall said she believed most schools were private schools which had more of a say in the way students spent their day.

“One school had Future City as a class period. We did ours on evenings and weekends,” Hall said.

Heritage Middle School won their regional competition held Jan. 19 at the Columbus Science Institute, qualifying their team for the national competition.

The presentation team, which Boyd was a part of, was only part of the group that created RA.

A group of twenty students, their teacher and a volunteer engineer who served as the team’s mentor, all worked hard on the competition’s four areas. The group then voted on the three students who would represent their team at the competition.

Hall said the Heritage’s volunteer mentor, Ted Beidler from the Franklin County, Ohio Engineering Department, let the students decide what they wanted to do with their city. He was hands off but would step in when he saw a problem.

“He pointed out their pitfalls,” Hall said.

The students were expected to know about their city and to be prepared to defend it, as they would be judged by a panel of engineers during their presentation.

After the top five schools were chosen, the students had to repeat their presentation in front of a larger audience consisting of the judges, parents and the other teams.

There has been only one other team from Ohio to place in the top five of the competition, Hall said.

One of those students, now in high school, helped this year’s team with their project.

Hall said the team was thrilled when they made the top five, let alone the top spot.

“We were really shocked when we realized they were the first place winners,” Hall said.

The rest of the teams immediately congratulated them after the awards were announced, she said.

“They were all so supportive of one another,” Hall said. “Their character really impressed me.”

Hall said the most surprising part of this adventure is not that the team took home the first place trophy, but that these students were determined to create a better way of life for the future. They were set on creating a safer, more efficient and “greener” world.

“They want to be part of the solution,” Hall said.

FROM: Volume 146, Issue 18: March 6, 2008