Lansing Middle School Students Compete in Future City Competition to Address Climate Change Impacts
On Saturday, January 28th, sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade students in Mr. Yoakam’s Advanced Studies Class traveled to Seaman Middle School in Topeka to participate in the Future City Competition. Future City is a STEM competition aimed at developing engineering and design skills. Students are challenged to envision a city 100 years in the future. Students were asked to center their design around a climate change impact this year.
Students developed mitigation and adaptation strategies to address the identified effects. Each team of students created a 1500-word essay providing background information on their city and outlined their plans, built a scale model of their city, and completed several project plan deliverables. On the day of the competition, three representatives from each team presented their models and plans to a panel of engineers and fielded an array of questions regarding the entire design and build process. Students were able to view models and discuss plans with team members from 39 other teams represented at the competition.
Following the competition, the teams completed an after-action review to determine best practices and lessons learned from their Future City experience. The sixth-grade team chose to address drought and safe water availability in one of the world’s hottest and driest areas, Oodnadatta, Australia. The seventh-grade team tackled flooding issues in Amsterdam, Netherlands through top-mix permeable concrete improvement and enhancements to the existing dam infrastructure. The eighth-grade team’s mitigation and adaptation efforts targeted the unique problems impacting Nuuk, Greenland due to the estimated annual loss of 250 billion metric tons of ice sheet loss.
- Thank you to Josh Yoakam for article and photos