Washington DC

On February 16th, 2015, Tedrowe and Marcia participated as judges in the Future City competition national finals in Washington DC. The Future City Competition is a national, project-based learning experience where students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade imagine, design, and build cities of the future. Students work as a team with an educator and engineer mentor to plan cities using SimCity™ software; research and write solutions to an engineering problem; and build tabletop scale models with recycled materials. We were honored to participate in this wonderful opportunity to interact with kids and their great ideas!

The Future City Competition was an amazing and heartening experience. We shared our thoughts about the experience in this excerpt from a post on our blog: “Perhaps few would argue there is nothing more joyful than watching children participate in group activities. The energy, playfulness, and exuberance are usually only pleasant memories for adults. We feel their joy, and might also feel a different sense of joy born from giving a richer and more meaningful dimension to their experience. Perhaps we are given the gift of feeling young again.

But, what can we say about activities when kids are tasked to solve very sobering, real problems such as saving our world? To take on this challenge, we must expose our children to the grit of our existence that undeniably carries extensive suffering. How do we solve problems of race, class, gender, pollution, global warming, and impending food shortages in a sustainable, healthy way?

The Future City Competition takes this challenge head on by brilliantly allowing middle school kids to tackle the most daunting of global problems, but framing this competition in the spirit of optimism and playfulness that only our youth are masters of. Equally important, the organizers see the power and potential of these 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, pushing their intellectual capital well beyond what we imagine possible for that age group.

Our future people will only be as powerful, inspirational, and capable as we develop them to be now. We are grateful to the organizers of the Future City Competition for having the foresight to foster brilliant, adorable, creative human beings that regenerate a moral and healthy world. We were deeply honored to be judges, gratefully learning an ocean of information from middle schoolers.