Tuesday, March 3, 2020
A team of students from Glen Hills Middle School in Glendale, Wisconsin recently competed in Washington, D.C., for the national Future City Competition.
The original 18-student team earned first place at the regional Future City regional competition in Milwaukee, earning them the opportunity to compete on the national level.
The Future City Competition challenges students from grades 6-8 to create, design, and build a sustainable city. This year, the theme was “Clean Water: Tap into Tomorrow,” requiring students to build a city that can provide clean water 100 years from now.
Lalitha Murali, a teacher at Glen Hills Middle School, has student teams compete in the regional competition each year.
This year, Murali’s students began with research about the innovations they wanted in their city around water and sewer technology. This included finding information on cities and countries that had excellent water quality, which ended up including Stevens Point, Wisconsin, Switzerland, and Chile. They combined these locations to create the name of their future city: Swivenzille.
Students worked with local engineers and parent volunteers to learn as much as they could about the engineering aspects of creating such a city. They were required to create a project plan, presentation, essay, a virtual design, and a scale model of Swivenzille.
Aside from the science, design, and presentation aspects of creating their future city, 8th-grade student, Abigail Debbink emphasized another aspect of working on such a project. “A big lesson we learned is mostly that we have to use our time wisely. Having a really big team, we had to find ways to work together in a way that we got everyone’s ideas together,” she said.
Future City provides funding for three students, one mentor, and one teacher to participate in the national competition. Murali accompanied students, Abigail Debbink, Alexander Franklin, and Liana Lima, along with mentor, Tony Spolar to the competition.
“We had a wonderful experience representing our state at the international Future City competition,” Murali said. “More than 45,000 middle school students from 1,500 schools in more than 40 US regions, as well as teams from Canada and China have participated in this year's competition.”
Murali always looks forward to this competition and the many other enrichment projects she works on with students throughout each year. “I love working with the kids on various projects. That’s what keeps me energized and motivated. They love what they are doing and they are so motivated. They want to learn.”