Middle school team wins Future City Competition awards at Carnegie Science Center

Lincoln Park middle school students won awards recently during their first Pittsburgh Regional Future City Competition at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh.

The competition, which took place Jan. 19, is an innovative, nationally-recognized engineering program for students in sixth to eighth grades. This year’s challenge was to design and create a city that could exist 100 years in the future with a power grid that could withstand a natural disaster.

Lincoln Park’s team created a virtual city, wrote a 1,500-word essay and developed a presentation and a scale model to represent the city they imagined with an underground power grid that runs on solar, wind, hydroelectric, and even lunar power.

The team of seventh- and eighth-graders presented their creation during the competition, impressing the judges to win awards for “Outstanding First Year Team” and “Best Land Surveying Practices.”

Lincoln Park Club Advisor Jessica Ezop said although the team did not make the national competition Feb. 16-19 in Washington, D.C., students are already brainstorming our city for next year’s competition.

The following team members participated: Eighth-graders Blair McCombs, Madison McCune and Mehki Turner, and seventh graders-David McCombs, Noah Kurschinske, Aidan Ford, Leyhm Shroads, Haley Hunt, Sarah Dawso, Seth Smith, and Veronica VanDam.

Regional Coordinator Lorren Kezmoh said 25 teams registered to compete, however, due to the declared state of emergency and vehicle restrictions on state roads, only 19 teams were able to attend. In addition to all counties in western Pennsylvania, competitors came from as far north as Erie, as far east as Bedford, and several schools competed from northern West Virginia.