ACEP Staff Provide Feedback for Watershed School Future Cities Teams

Last week, ACEP’s Gwen Holdmann, Dominique Pride and Amanda Byrd provided early feedback and judging in a preliminary Future City Competition presentation by teams from Watershed School in Fairbanks.

Future City is 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. Students spend approximately four months creating cities that exist at least 100 years in the future. Their model cities demonstrate solutions to sustainability issues.

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.

Watershed School’s six teams of three students presented their future cities to the judges. Teams used information from an essay they wrote to, in detail, describe their Fairbanks 100 years in the future, including the renewable energy infrastructure, transportation and community buildings. The presentations incorporated digital and tabletop models of their future Fairbanks, with economic and demographic details.

Watershed School will participate in the Washington Northwest Region final in January via Skype, and regional finalists will compete at the national level on Feb.19, 2019.

 

A Future City model of Fairbanks energy infrastructure 100 years from now. Photo by Amanda Byrd.