Watershed School’s Future City Project 2018

Seventh- and eighth-grade students at Watershed Middle School will work in teams of three to build their idea of a future Fairbanks.

Their work is part of Future City, a national cross-curricular program that lets students in grades six through eight do the things engineers do: identify problems, brainstorm ideas, design solutions, test, retest, build and then share the results.

This year’s challenge: Design a resilient power grid for your future city that can withstand and quickly recover from the impacts of a natural disaster.

Teams will design a scaled, virtual city model. The simulation teaches students how to plan a city, helps them see consequences of decisions and lets them explore various layouts and designs. They use SimCity software.

Teams compose an essay describing their problems and solutions, their power grid system and the natural disaster.

The Watershed students will give a seven-minute presentation to judges via Skype, followed by a five- to eight-minute question-and-answer period. Judges for the Watershed School team are from the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, ACEP and the Future City regional office in Seattle. They’ll provide feedback and scores on the final projects in January 2019.

For more information on the Future City Competition, visit the website at https://futurecity.org/.

 

ACEP’s Heike Merkel shows Watershed Middle School students participating in the Future City Competition the control system for the Power Systems Integration Lab. Photo by Marcia Cassino/ACEP.