Crestview middle schoolers represent Ohio at national Future City design competition
ASHLAND – The city of NewTree Evergreen.
It’s not a name you would see on a map, but it is the name that roughly 50 middle schoolers came up with for their futuristic waste-free city.
This city has a completely circular economy where everything is recycled and made into resources for the city. Stores grow their own food and make things out of mycelium, or mushroom roots, instead of plastic.
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Fast food places don’t exist, which helps encourage healthy lives, the students say. That healthy living mentality extends to the air as purifiers throughout the city help reduce air pollution.
Even though NewTree Evergreen isn’t a real place, students from Crestview Middle School planned out every detail, down to the traffic patterns and street names, so they could present it as part of the Future City competition this school year. The group did so well locally, they were chosen to represent Ohio at the national competition and are awaiting the results to be announced in March.
The foundations of the Future City project
Each year the Future City organizers come up with a theme for the project but leave all other decisions, like city size and location, up to the participants. It is the job of each group to interpret the theme and design what they think would make the best futuristic city.
Students are allowed to design their cities with virtual programs, like the Cities: Skyline program the Crestview students used, before building their physical models out of recycled materials.
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Jennifer Blackledge, a computer science teacher at Crestview Middle School, brought the Future City competition to Crestview roughly seven years ago. She saw some students presenting a city they had designed for the project and wanted to get her students involved with it.
The first three years Blackledge tried to get it going was difficult because finding the funding and the resources needed were hard, she said. Since then, Blackledge has been able to focus more on teaching the students about the inner workings of cities and helping them research each year’s theme, so they are prepared when they begin the design phase.
With this year’s theme “a Waste-Free Future,” the Crestview students came up with the motto "No Trash Cans, No Landfills" and decided to design a city where nothing was ever thrown away. Underneath the commercial and residential parts of the city, the students created several recycling centers that would take care of all the waste from up above.
Representing Crestview schools and Ohio
Other than designing the city, there were several components the students had to complete for the competition. These components included a 1,500-word essay, a 7-minute video and a PowerPoint presentation.
On Jan. 22, the day of the Ohio Regional competition, the students logged onto Zoom and went through 10 rounds of questions with a panel of judges. Each session was roughly 7 minutes long and consisted of various questions from the judges about how their city worked.
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“At first it was kind of scary,” said eighth-grader Scarlett Allison, one of the students on the Crestview team. “… but as soon as we got the big points out of the way, we could kind of break it down for the other judges.”
After competing at the regional level, Blackledge said they were notified Jan. 29 they were chosen to move on, but only had about a week to prepare for the national competition on Feb. 5.
Blackledge said the students took extra time outside of their regular school day and even on snow days to prepare for the event.
The team now awaits responses from the judges about which team will win and what the grand prize is. The awards and winner of the national competition will be announced March 23 via a livestream on Facebook and futurecity.org.
Reach Rachel Karas at rkaras@gannett.com
On Twitter: @RachelKaras3
This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: Ohio represented by Crestview students at Future City competition
