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B-P Future City team brings home awards

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Future City competitors

Future City competitors

The presenters at the Future City competition were, from left, Miles Compani, Kate Szumowski and Ben Nellis.

Members of Broadalbin-Perth Middle School’s Future City Club recently brought home the “Most Neighborly” and “Best Land Survey” awards from the regional Future City Competition at Proctor’s in Schenectady.

The Future City Competition is a national, project-based learning experience in which students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades imagine, design and build models of cities of the future. As part of the program, students work as a team with advising teachers to plan cities using SimCity software, research and write solutions to an engineering problem, build tabletop scale models with recycled materials and present their ideas to judges at regional competitions. This year’s Future City theme was “Waste Not Want Not,” and students were tasked with designing a city with an effective waste management system 100 years in the future.

This is the second year B-P has put forth a team, with science teachers Anita Stabrowski and Michael Nacheman as advisors.

To prepare for competition, the Future City Club, consisting of 14 Broadalbin-Perth Middle School students, spent many hours working on the virtual city, the essay, the city model and the skit.

Eighth-grader Ben Nellis, who participated in the much smaller B-P Future City team last year, said it was great having so much more support during the months of preparation. “It was a lot more about teamwork this year,” he said.Future City model

Nellis, along with Kate Szumowski and Miles Compani, represented the team at the Jan. 9 competition, doing the presentation and skit for the judges.

Compani, an eighth-grader, said he enjoyed the SimCity computer work the most. “It was fun building the city and seeing how anything you did affected other parts of the city,” he said.

Szumowski, a sixth-grader, said she enjoyed the day the club members spent at Proctor’s. “I liked seeing all the other teams, seeing what they came up with and meeting them and connecting with their experience,” she said.

Stabrowski said the Future City project is a lot of work, but she thinks it’s an excellent program that is tailored specifically to middle school students.

This year, Nachtman began teaching a Future City science elective at BPMS. The semester-long class is offered to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Expanding on these types of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) courses is something the school district is incorporating into its long-term comprehensive plan to better prepare students for college and careers.

 

 


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