Building a City From the Ground Up

When the judges declared that Collin Westgard's Future City team won the Minnesota regional competition on Jan. 14, Westgard felt elated—and then exhausted.

That's because Westgard and the other members of their Future City team from have spent the last few weeks feverishly preparing for the competition, which was held at the University of Minnesota.

The Future City program is a national competition with roughly 35,000 participants this year. Teams from around the country prepare for and then compete in regional events, and the lucky few winners are invited to Crystal City, Va. for the national competition.

The program challenges students to build an imagined city from the ground up, designing everything from the transportation infrastructure to the form of government, and then present their concepts to a panel of judges who grill the team members about all aspects of the city. Each annual competition is organized around a theme, and this year's topic was meeting energy needs in a sustainable way.

Westgard and six fellow team members—all students at Black Hawk Middle School—designed a metropolis called Vita Nova. The city has roughly 2 million residents and is situated between an ocean and a dormant volcano on the imagined planet Terra 2, according to team member Ben Pankow.

In accordance with the theme of this year's Future City competition, the trio incorporated geothermal energy, solar energy and wireless power transmission concepts into the city's designs.

"Designing this whole thing was the culmination of every subject you could possibly learn, besides band," said Will Cobbett. The seventh-grader is one of the three team members, including Westgard and Pankow, who will present the city at the national competition on Feb. 19-21.

"You have to have writing skills, presenting skills, physical building skills, math skills and engineering skills," Cobbett added.

The Vita Nova team is one of three Black Hawk Middle School teams that competed at the regional event held at the University of Minnesota. To prepare for the competition, the students wrote a research essay explaining the concepts of the city; built a model city on a $100 budget; created a virtual city using the computer game SimCity 4; and wrote a 500-word narrative of the city.

At the regional competition, they defended their ideas before several panels of judges. Roughly 50 teams from more than 25 schools across the state also participated in the Jan. 14 competition.

The team is coached by Black Hawk Middle School Gifted and Talented Coordinator David Herem and advised by Eagan City Engineer Russ Matthys.

“I think it’s a realization of their skils," Herem said. "So often in class, they’re made to take a test or write an essay, and the fruit of their labor is an 'A'. They’re incredibly smart, but this is a chance for them to be pushed in a different way."

"I like this, because it teaches you stuff you don't learn normally," Pankow said.