Hanes Team Wins State Future City Competition

On Jan. 21, a team from Hanes Magnet School competed in and won the state championship in the Future City Engineering Competition.

The team’s teacher is John Boyd. The team mentor is Rajesh Kapileshwari. The members of “Team Aleppo” are Simran Vadgama, Vidhi Patel, Arya Vinod, Kiran Kapelishwari, May Cheron and Jake Prince.

Kapileshwari reported that the team won $1,300 in cash prizes – $1,000 for winning the state championship, $150 for the Best Research Essay, and $150 for People’s choice award for the City Model built to scale. Three team members, along with Boyd and Kapileshwari, have been invited to compete Feb. 18-21in the finals in Washington. The organizers will pay for the flights and hotel rooms for the five. 

Kapileshwari ‘s older son, Rohan, who also competed for three years while he was at Hanes Magnet, wrote a news brief. Here is an excerpt: 

Sickness, hunger, poverty. Climate change, conflict, and inequality. These are the problems that students from Hanes Magnet School engineered solutions to by implementing public spaces into a city. These solutions, ranging from the simple to the complex, took into account many factors of the city that they were designed to address: culture, citizen identity, history, and many more, eventually leading to a hopeful view of a futuristic city that could be free of the issues that plague us today.

Here is what a release from Future City had to say:

The Future City Competition is a project-based learning experience where students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade imagine, research, design, and build cities of the future. Keeping the engineering design process and project management front and center, students are asked to address an authentic, real-world question: How can we make the world a better place?

Public spaces have the capacity to revitalize a city’s economy by introducing new businesses and bringing in new visitors. They can also help reduce crime, ease traffic congestion, improve pedestrian safety, promote healthy living, improve the environment, and enhance civic engagement. A recent study by the UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatories Unit found that cities that devoted about 50% of their space to public use tended to be more prosperous and have a higher quality of life.

Since returning to school earlier this fall, 31 student teams across North Carolina have been hard at work on their Future City projects. Altogether, more than 40,000 middle school students from 1,350 schools around the country are engaged in similar competitions.

Working in a team with an educator and engineer mentor, students are challenged to design a virtual city using SimCity software. They research today’s public spaces and write a city essay about their solutions and city design. Students then bring their ideas to life by building a tabletop scale model of their city using recycled materials on a budget of $100 or less and give a brief presentation about their city.

Major funding for the Finals comes from Bechtel Corporation, Bentley Systems, Shell Oil Company and DiscoverE.

To learn more, visit www.futurecity.org