On Tuesday, January 13th, Louisville’s Future Cities group Terra Verdia won first place and got a special opportunity to visit Washington D.C. for a nation-wide competition. Kids from all over got to show off their ideas on how cities will look in the future and their perks.
Future Cities is an engineering club that builds a generating city that has moving parts and is functional for the future. Each student has a special job that they are assigned to do to help their team create this city. Students can have a speaker, builder, artist, writer, organizer, and researcher.
Members of the group Terra Verdia include sixth graders Justus Barnes, Gemma Bender, Hayden Christensen, Tenley French, Grayson Jensen, Ella Little, Carlee Ryan, Isabella Snyder, and Harper Toelle. Advisor of the Future Cities program for Louisville is Laurie Little.
Future Cities focuses on making an eco-friendly city that uses recycling, new energy methods, and different ways of transportation. The students make a model based on all of the different methods they use and go to different competitions.
Gemma Bender said, “I was very excited when I found out that we were going to Washington D.C.”
The Hyatt Regency hosted the event and the company that hosts it is called Discover Engineering. There were a total of 44 teams there, but not only were there kids from all over the United States, but there were 5 teams from China and 2 from India. The age range was anywhere from 6th to 8th graders. This was Louisville’s 2nd year of offering kids the opportunity to join this activity. They start working on the background information all the way back in September to ensure that their model and information was as ready as possible!
When students got to D.C., they ran into a problem. When they had shipped their model over, the model had become destroyed in the mail.
Mrs. Little said, “The kids worked hard and were patient with each other to help them fully restore their model and get it ready to present!”
From small town competitions to traveling all the way to Washington D.C., this group of students had much success with building their city. Students were very happy to have succeeded.