By Jennifer Theurer
Pike Valley seventh and eighth graders are headed to Washington, D.C. in February to compete in the national Future City Finals Event. Team leader and business teacher Leigh Gritten said the team qualified for the trip because of their outstanding performance at the recent Future City regional event in Topeka.
“We won the Land Surveying Award, which is something we’re pretty proud of because we understand and appreciate the job that a land surveyor does and the importance of that,” she said, adding that the team placed second overall and for the Standard of Excellence Award. The Standard of Excellence Award is given to the team that shows the most professionalism, confidence, and energy.
“I was really proud of the kids for receiving second place in that award too,” Gritten said.
Sitting and kneeling from left to right, Kohlee White (7th), Alessandra Mejias (8th), Ryder Gile (7th), Arianna Reeves (7th), Lilliana Mejias (7th), Lauren Strnad (8th), and Kyra Evert (8th). Not pictured is Natalie Mohler (7th). (Photo courtesy of Leigh Gritten, Pike Valley Schools.)
According to the Future City competition website, student teams are asked to create and design a visionary city using science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to solve a city-wide sustainability issue.
Eighth grader Kyra Evert said, “Our name of our future city is Ostburg, which is Danish for cheese castle, and we are located in Denmark.”
The team has several items they have to have ready for the competition.
“For the preparation, research is required as well as establishing goals and setting a schedule,” Evert’s classmate Caleb Woodard said. “We’re required to write an essay that describes our city and its innovative features and building model.”
This year’s Future City challenge was eliminating food waste on a city-wide scale.
“We had to come up with two innovative solutions,” Joshuah Budreau, eighth grade, said. “Our solutions were composting tubes throughout a city that people put their waste into.”
Woodard added, “Our composting tubes in our city transferred compost from bins in every building within our city to the recycling plant and composting areas to make sure that all of our waste is reused in some way or also fed to livestock.”
All the technology the team uses in their city has been developed, it just isn’t widely available yet. Gritten sited that things like drones and global positioning systems were once considered futuristic options in the competition.
Gritten said, “That’s what was fun about Future City is kids do research what is currently out there, but just so new that we don’t really have access to it right now.”
