Feb. 6, 2020
Students from James B. Sanderlin IB World School won the regional competition of the 2020 Regional Future City Competition. There were 24 teams representing multiple school districts from the Tampa Bay area. The Sanderlin team will now travel to Washington, D.C. Feb. 15-19 to compete in the national competition.
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 Clean Water: Tap into Tomorrow.
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.
