DiscoverE Future City Competition

If you've paid any attention to this generation of young people, specifically high school age teens, you've probably worried about the future of this country. Well, don't fret because there are some super sharp middle school students who are prepared to ROCK. On Sunday, my oldest baby and I had the pleasure of attending the 2015 Future City Competition National Finals. My boys are obsessed with building and tinkering (legos anyone?) so I knew that seeing the projects that these other kids put together would get my budding engineer excited. Here's a little background on the competition:

Future City (a STEM program)  is a program of DiscoverE, a consortium of professional and technical societies and major U.S. corporations. The annual Future City Competition for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students is held from September 2014 through February 2015. More than 40,000 students from 1,350 middle schools are participating nationwide in the regional competitions. The top prize at the National Finals is $7,500 for the organization’s STEM program plus a trip to U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama for the official team members, awarded by Bentley Systems, Incorporated.

I'd never heard of such a program before and was really glad that we could participate. I've been doing quite a bit of research lately about STEM programs for my boys especially since they're still young and so excited about learning. The theme of This year’s challenge was "Feeding Future Cities". Students were tasked with designing a futuristic urban farm environment to grow enough of one vegetable crop and one protein crop to feed their citizens. The stuff these kids came up with was amazing. What I found especially interesting was that each team only got a $100 budget to build their cities so many of them found super creative ways to use/recycle everyday items. These were some of our faves: 

I spy a future future city builder

We had a great time talking to the students and having them give us "tours" of their cities. These kids are super bright and the did awesome work. DiscoverE has put together an awesome way for these boys and girls (woot) to bring their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education to life while coming up with ideas to make the world a better place at the same time. As a parent, I think that's awesome. 

If you're interested, click here to get more information about DiscoverE and the future city competition. Also check out their upcoming events for fun events in your area.

 The fine folks at Blogalicious bLink and DiscoverE invited my little one and I to attend Future City and share our experience, but just so ya know, all of the opinions here are my own. 

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of DiscoverE. The opinions and text are all mine.