Our Wildwood, Summer 2016, Volume 39

Perspectives

by Cameron S. ‘20

THE NAT IONAL FUTURE CI TY COMPET I T ION STARTS WI TH a question—how can we make the world a better place? To answer it, teams of 8th graders across the United States research, design, and build cities of the future that show our solution to a citywide sustainability issue. Past topics include storm-water management, urban agriculture, and green energy. This year’s topic was waste management. Wildwood competed in the Southern California regionals in January. I was part of Team Futureville. The challenge was to create a successful virtual city that thrives and has strong infrastructure using the software SimCity. Before we began to design the virtual city, we set a series of goals for it. For example, if one of the goals is to have a well-educated population, we would direct more resources to schools. The second step in the Future City process is to write a 1,500-word city description essay explaining what the city will be like, why it is innovative, why people would want to live in the city, and how it stands out from other cities. The third step in the process is to build a scale model

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with the team and make it as neat and precise as possible. The final step is to create an oral presentation that explains our city in a creative and detailed way. At the competition, each team sets up at a table so individual judges can come by and ask questions about the city until your team is called up to present in front of a group of judges. Then comes the award ceremony. We were thrilled and honored to hear our name called as first-place winners! Team Futureville won first place at the regional competition and had the privilege of going to nationals in Washington, D.C., in February. “ We were thrilled and honored to hear our name called as first-place winners! The biggest challenge for my team was meeting deadlines and managing time. Compared to most teams, ours was tiny and consisted of only three people. While we knew that being in a small team was good because all our ideas would be heard, we also knew that having such a small team meant we would need to sacrifice free personal time that other teams had with more team members. We spent at least three weekends together just working and concentrating only on our project. Our team would not have gotten far if our ideas were ordinary. It is important to have unique ideas in order to succeed. Team Futureville’s ideas focused heavily on the environment and applied techniques that may seem impossible, such as using ocean water to transport and clean trash from the ocean and the streets. When it was announced that we won first place, I was incredibly happy but even more surprised that they appreciated our out-of-the-box ideas. Throughout the Future City Competition, my teammates and I were brave thinkers, and I believe it made all the difference.

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