Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Three floors of the Zeneah Engineering Complex at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), were crawling with middle school students on Saturday, as 24 teams from across the state and region gathered for the annual Future Cities Competition.

Saturday was the qualifying regional event that selected one team to progress to the national competition in Washington, DC, from February 14 to 17. The selected team was comprised of middle school students from Annoor Academy of Knoxville. They called their winning city “SFAX.”

The Future City Competition is a project‑based STEM program for middle school students that challenges teams to imagine, design, and build a city set 100 years in the future. It is organized by DiscoverE, a nonprofit focused on expanding access to engineering education. Alcoa-based LDA Engineering served as the program’s regional coordinator for the ninth consecutive year.

The purpose of the Future City Competition is to expose students to careers in STEM, ranging from engineering, power/ utilities, city planning, and design. This year, student teams were tasked with creating a city that had a strategic model around solving the problem of food waste.

Students did this by writing a 1,500-word essay, crafting a table-top scale model of their city (built from recycled materials), and presenting live to a panel of judges.

According to the national Future City program, this creative competition leaves lasting effects on students.

After the competition, 68 percent of participating students can see themselves becoming engineers, and 89 percent reported that Future City helped them to appreciate all of the engineering that goes into a city.

Read more about the Future City program.

Images courtesy of LDA Engineering.

---