Future City Engineering Competition tomorrow!

Tomorrow morning at 5:45 AM (!!!!), we will get on the bus to Philadelphia along with the rest of the team and their families and head to the Future City Engineering Competition for a full day of judging, presentations, awards, etc. It will be a very long day for all of us, especially the team. Joel was chosen by his team to be one of the three presenters so he will be answering questions by professional engineers about their future city design. He will also be presenting their city to the judges in a skit format in which he plays the role of the successor of David Murdock, the owner and founder of Dole Foods and Dole Nutrition Group.

Joel and his team of other homeschooled 7th and 8th graders built a model city called Waiani in Hawaii, which means beautiful fresh water city. They created their model city with trash, recycled materials and anything they could find. It all had to be built to scale and had to include certain elements including a movable part. They had to do a computer design of the city using Sim City software and again they had to meet many requirements for that portion of the competition. They had to write a research essay and a design abstract on the topic: "Creating a self sufficint system within the home which conserves, recycles and reuses all existing water sources."

Each of those requirements along with the oral presentation - all factor into the points needed to win the competition. Joel and his team have worked very, very hard on this. They have a wonderful teacher who has poured herself into this and opened her home on weekends for workdays for the team. Also they have an engineer mentor who has helped the team understand how to envision technologies of the future and incorporate those ideas into their city.

To read about this competition go to www.futurecity.org

Last year, there were 32 teams at the regional competition and our team won 4th place! This year, we are hoping to be in the top three. The first place team will then advance to the National Competition held in Washington D.C. next month.

Please pray for Joel and the team tomorrow as they spend the day talking to judges and being at their "very best" all day. It will be stressfull and they will be grilled with lots of questions from engineers. They have to think quickly and creatively answer questions that they may have not even thought about before! Also, as homeschooled students, they will be noticed by all the judges and professionals and pray that they will be a good testimony to those who sometimes misjudge homeschooled students!

Jaden will be spending the night and the day tomorrow with Grandma while the rest of us go to the competition. He is very excited about going to Grandma's house all by himself for a sleep-over! She is going to spoil him rotten.... eat out, go to the Children's Museum, play with new toys..... but they'll have fun. I'll post on here late Saturday night when we get back about the results of the competition.

Thanks for praying!!!