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Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Middle school students: ‘We built this city’
Youths plan Future Cities with eye on livability, power needs, businesses
CEDAR RAPIDS — How would you build a city on the moon?
How do you design a city that’s fully electric, with power coming from only healthy sources?
And how do you keep everyone employed and happy?
These are the kinds of questions that middle schoolers nationwide get to wrestle with each winter during the Future Cities competition.
In Iowa, those students will come together in January in Cedar Rapids to see whose ideas are the best. The winner will go on to the National Future City Awards competition in March.
The competition is designed to get students to answer one question: How can we make the world a better place? From that starting point, students do research, write essays, build a physical model and create team presentations as they build their cities.
According to Samantha Dahlby, NewBoCo’s director of K-12 education, NewBoCo chose to get involved in running the Iowa portion of the competition because “accelerating life-changing ideas is part of the mission at NewBoCo, and Future Cities absolutely does that.”
“Our goal at NewBoCo is to give students access to innovative and engaging STEM education,” she said.
“A lot of research shows that students start to self-select out of STEM careers in middle school because they don’t see people like themselves,” Dahlby added. “So projects like this can really make science exciting and fun, and bring that competition feel to it and get kids excited.”
Team effort
Each Future Cities team is required to have a minimum of three students. However, NewBoCo K-12 Student Program Coordinator Andy Fiedler — who serves as Future Cities Iowa’s regional co-coordinator — said that he saw teams of “upward of 30 to 40 kids per team” at last year’s national competition.
For this year’s competition, the theme is “Electrify Your Future.” Students will be required to design a city that is “100 percent electrically powered, with energy generated from sources that keep their citizens and the environment healthy and safe,” according to FutureCity.org.
Students need to write an essay that explains their city’s concept and then design a physical model of it that features at least one moving part.
Fiedler said each team is limited to $100 or less for materials.
“That incentivizes you to use recycled materials, since they don’t go toward the dollar total,” he said.
Students also have to put together a presentation that they give at the Jan. 20 regional event in Cedar Rapids.
This leads to a lot of creativity, Dahlby said, saying some teams have approached the presentation as a tour by the mayor or a game show with trivia about the city.
“They get to show off not only this city that they have done all this research on and designed, but also they get to present it and make it exciting and engaging,” he said.
Building other skills
In order to make the event run smoothly Jan. 20, organizers rely on volunteers.
Roles range from judges who read and grade essays from each team; timekeepers who keep each presenting team on track; room coordinators, who make sure the right teams are in the right place on competition day; and general-help volunteers.
Dahlby and Fiedler encourage potential volunteers to sign up at newbo.co.
“Volunteering is as easy as signing up on a Google form,” Fiedler said.
Organizers said different teams excel in different areas, and the awards presentation at the end of the day is designed to reflect that. Some teams are brilliant model builders; others are great presenters; and others put their most creative ideas into the essay.
“We have awards for the best use of recycled materials, or awards that are built around that year’s theme,” Dahlby said. “You want to recognize areas that certain teams excelled in, even if they didn’t make the top five overall.”
Dalby and Fiedler both noted that competitors in Future Cities gain skills that go far beyond engineering. They have to work as a team. They need to use time management. Plus they’re learning critical thinking skills as they discuss real-world issues.
“Any time kids take into account politics or economic structure of a city they’ve designed — that certainly isn’t something that they have to do, but it’s cool to see middle schoolers thinking about ‘How should we govern? How should we distribute wealth?’ ” Fiedler said. “This program makes you really hopeful for the future.”
The author is communications director for NewBoCo.
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