In January, area middle schools headed to IPFW to via for the regional finals of the Future Cities Competition. The contest features tabletop models of future cities.
If you spend any time with middle schoolers, it's rare to hear these words.
“I've never gotten an opportunity to be able to compete in such a big competition with schools from all around Indiana, and then just knowing that we won that and being able to compete against people from other countries,” said Kendra Sandlin, an eighth-grader at Riverview Middle School in Huntington.
“That's just I don't know how I'm supposed to explain it because it just being able to do that is just awesome,” Sandlin said.
The experience she is describing is the experience of being a part of the winning, Indiana team in the Future Cities competition. This national competition is sponsored by Discover E - an organization committed to encouraging careers in the engineering fields.
Carol Dostal, the Director of Outreach for the College of Engineering, Technology, Computer Science at IPFW, and the Indiana coordinator for the Future Cities competition, said the benefit of the competition goes well beyond science and engineering.
“There is a strong liberal arts component to it,” Dostal said. “The students have to write an essay they have to do research, but then they have to present their city to a panel of judges.”
During that presentation time, the students have to defend what they’ve designed via a three-minute question-and-answer session.
“In another way also, the field combines that STEM education focus with the liberal arts communication collaboration focus, and then they learn about their city,” Dostal said.
The process for Kendra and her teammates at Riverview Middle school began last August.
William Bostain, an eighth grade science teacher at Riverview and sponsor of the Future City Competition team, likes the all-encompassing nature of the project.
“So there's a lot of things, presentation skills that we focus on and so this project is huge when it comes to covering a lot of things that that these students need for their future,” Bostain said.
Kendra said she found the design process challenging.
“The redesigning, the testing, and improving because you have to design what you want to do when you come up with your solution, but then when something doesn't work you just have to keep trying different things until it does work, which we had to do a lot,” she said.
Such work occasionally led to discouragement.
“We had a board at the beginning, and we had put it all together, and we thought that's what we wanted to do with it, but then we started to get into what we were doing with our transportation and we cut an unnecessary hole in the middle of our board that we thought we needed,” Kendra said.
“But then we didn't need it for what we wanted to do instead so we had to completely redo our board at that point and that was like two months into it so he had already been working for a while before we did that so that was probably that was really discouraging for me.”
But Kendra and her teammates refused to give up.
Bostain recognized their countless hours of work, in spite of school breaks and busy schedules.
“It's something really special as an educator to see that these group of kids are dedicated enough to be able to do that and want to do that and you know, me personally, I'm so thankful for it because it makes my job enjoyable to be able to see that,” Bostain said.
Like all good teachers, Bostain gives all the credit to the kids.
“Honestly. It's the students and the hard work they put in. You know, each year, you know, we have 40 teams to choose from. With the success that we've had, we're able to get group of students every year that that want this and they put in the time and effort, and we have a dedicated group of kids here in Huntington, and they want this as bad as anybody and they put in the time.”
And like any highly-motivated student, Kendra gives credit to Mr. Bostain.
“Well I've always wanted to be a teacher so doing this really grew on that, because I look up to Mr. Bostain as a teacher,” she said.
Kendra and her teammates head to Washington, D.C. from Feb 17-20 to compete against about 50 teams from throughout the US and the world.
This is the third year in a row Riverview Middle school has sent a team to the nationals.