WASHINGTON, DC — The Michigan Future City champions from St. John Lutheran School in Rochester won two special awards at the National Future City competition, held this week in Washington, DC as part of National Engineers Week.
The team won the Michigan Regional Competition of Future City, hosted by The Engineering Society of Detroit, on Jan. 29.
In the nationals, St. John won special awards for Best City Essay and Best Virtual City Design for their city, Des-Monez. Presenters were Lily Meyers, Anna Bochenek and Emerson Kerska. Educators assisting the team were Linda Gerhardt and Tim Grothaus, and the team’s engineer mentor was William Abramczyk.
In Future City, students in grades 6, 7, and 8 are asked to design a city set at least 100 years in the future, with a central organizing theme this year that keeps the competition fresh. For 2019, the teams were asked to design a city with a resilient power grid that could stand up to natural disasters.
A team from the Central Pennsylvania Region, Warwick Middle School of Lititz, Pa., won the national title.
Second place went to Alabama Region students from Academy for Science and Foreign Language in Huntsville. The New Jersey Region students from JerseySTEM took third place.
More information — including how to sign a middle school team up for the 2020 competition — may be found at https://futurecity.org/.