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Morgan Fitzgerald Middle School students head to D.C. for national competition
Feb. 14, 2018
For Ray Kwak, it was about ensuring that things were precise. Drew Hornyak searched for ways to reduce human error in a system and Elise Tong had a worldview of an environment where people could live long and happy lives. For these three Morgan Fitzgerald Middle School seventh-graders, those thoughts resulted in a model city named Luminic where there are 25 parks and an essay to use, age-friendly transit system. Luminic derives from the words light and age.
The three students created a two-level model of the city and during last month’s Future City Regionals competition, described how the city and its systems worked to judges. As a result, they made school history by winning the Future City Regionals competition. This weekend, they will head to Washington, D.C. where they will compete in the national competition. At the regional competition, the team also won the People’s Choice Award, which is decided by all the participants in the regional competition.
“I am super proud of them and I was overwhelmed,” said Diana Wolff, a Gifted Studies teacher at Morgan Fitzgerald Middle and one of the team’s coaches. “As a teacher, you talk about student gains and it was remarkable to see how they learned from what they did wrong at the school competition, to make the corrections, and go on to win the regional competition. It’s remarkable.”
Future City is an engineering competition that poses a question to sixth, seventh and eighth-graders: how can you make the world a better place? The students then imagine, research, design, and build cities of the future that showcase their solution to a citywide sustainability issue. Past topics include stormwater management, urban agriculture, public spaces, and green energy. This year’s topic is the Age-Friendly City. Teams identify an age-related challenge that exists in today’s urban environments and engineer two innovative solutions that allow their future city’s senior citizens to be as active and independent as they want to be.
Participates must complete five deliverables: a virtual city design (using SimCity); a 1,500-word city essay; a scale model; a project plan, and a presentation to judges at Regional Competitions in January.
Future City is a flexible, cross-curricular educational program that gives students an opportunity to do the things that engineers do—identify problems; brainstorm ideas; design solutions; test, retest and build, and share their results. This process is called the engineering design process. With this at its center, Future City is an engaging way to build students’ 21st-century skills.