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The 2024 — 2025 Future City Competition Theme
Above the Current
Overview: The Floating City Challenge
Floating cities have captured our imaginations for thousands of years. As long ago as the 7th century BC, Homer described one in The Odyssey. But now, floating cities are more than a fantastical idea: engineers, scientists, and architects are making them real.
It’s predicted that by the end of this century more than 500 coastal cities around the world will be underwater because of sea level rise. Massive storms fueled by climate change will further threaten flooded coasts.
In recent years, scientists and engineers have been building prototypes of floating cities. Floating cities can rise along with sea levels and ride the waves of big storms. If floating cities near coastlines become a reality, then coastal ecosystems can be restored to act as natural flood barriers. In some cases, floating cities are extensions of existing cities, in other cases they are completely independent.
Today’s experimental floating cities use cutting-edge technology and clean energy to house people comfortably and provide everything they need. Built with materials that have neutral or beneficial impacts on biological systems, they are designed to start healing the damage done to the ocean as well as keep their residents safe and healthy.
The students’ challenge:
Design a floating city and provide two innovative examples of how your floating city works and keeps its citizens healthy and safe.
The mission of the DiscoverE Future City Competition is to provide a fun and exciting educational engineering program for middle school students that combines a stimulating engineering challenge with a "hands-on" application to present their vision of a city of the future.
The Philadelphia Regional Future City Competition is a 501.c.3 educational outreach program of DiscoverE. We are one of over 50 regional programs conducted throughout the the United States and the world with the goal to introduce middle school students to the engineering profession. The Future City Program continues to be on the National Association of Secondary School Principals' National Advisory List of Student Contests and Activities.
The Philadelphia Regional Competition draws schools from Philadelphia and surrounding counties including the Lehigh Valley, Southern New Jersey and Delaware. Students from middle schools and after school programs in the region form teams consisting of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students who work with a teacher and an engineer mentor from September to January.
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For Web site Information see Steering Committee
Where are the Future City schools - 2023?
Last Modified 11/03/2024