A city of the future—“Mwinda”—engineered by students from St. Thomas More School in Baton Rouge has won the 2007 National Engineers Week Future City Competition. The students—Jake Bowers, 12, Emily Ponti, 14, and Krisha Sherburne, 12—teamed up with their teacher Shirley Newman, and volunteer engineer mentor Guy Macarios. St. Thomas More was the winner of the Louisiana regional competition held on January 26 in Alexandria.
Teams from 35 middle schools nationwide, winners of regional competitions in January, participated in the Future City National Finals, February 19-22 at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.Future City, celebrating its 15
th anniversary, asks middle school students to create cities of the future, first on computer and then in large tabletop models. Working in teams with a teacher and volunteer engineer mentor, students create their cities using the
SimCity 3000 videogame donated to all participating schools by Electronic Arts, Inc. of Redwood City, California. They write a city abstract and an essay on using engineering to solve an important social need—this year's theme is using fuel cells to power a city of the future. Then they present and defend their cities before engineer judges at the competition. Some 30,000 students from more than 1,000 schools participated in 2006-07.
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--RSN