2023 ESD Future City Event – “Best Engineered Project”

We were thrilled to again be part of the Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD) Future City Competition at the Suburban Collection Showplace on January 23rd, 2023. As we have done for more than a decade, NTH sent a team to evaluate and judge the projects to determine who would receive our sponsored award, “Best Engineered Project”.

Future City is a cross-curricular educational program where students in 6th, 7th and 8th grades imagine, design, and build cities of the future. This past fall, middle school students began work on the Future City Competition; a project-based learning program where students work as a team with an educator and volunteer mentor to design a city of the future. Students had to tackle this year’s challenge of climate change and were tasked with designing one innovative and futuristic climate change adaptation and one mitigation strategy to keep their city’s resident healthy and safe.

​There were many very interesting projects being showcased throughout the competition, but after further evaluation and a little bit of NTH team collaboration, we ultimately awarded the “Best Engineered Project” to Team ‘New Kirkland’ from Tappan Middle School from Ann Arbor, MI! Overall, their city was well-designed, and the students were very informed when it came to each individual aspect of their project. ‘New Kirkland’ involved the climate change impact created by a now, nonactive volcano, where residents are currently residing – all in correlation with the use of wind power, solar power, and hydro power to keep the city’s residents safe and healthy.

Our judging team of Scott Palmer, Brock Bosack, Steve McManus, Marcus Mertz, Craig Johnson, and Lisa Dilg believed that Tappan did the best job of taking into consideration the effects, and adaptation needed, to combat climate change. Congratulations to Tappan and to all of the Future City participants.