Pictures from Future City Engineering Competition

Here are the three Presenters from our Hempfield Homeschoolers' Future City Engineering Team: Marshall, Joshua and Joel standing behind their model city Waiani. Most of the morning, Joel and the other presenters had to answer questions from engineer judges about their city.

The team spent hours answering questions from the engineers. In the end, they received two special awards: Best electro-engineering and Best Creative Problem Solving awards.

Here are some close-up pictures of Waiani, the model city. It is located in Hawaii in the year 2158. The scale of the city is 1 inch =40 feet.

Notice the stadium of the Waianni Wild Hogs made by Joel. Nearby is a beautiful waterfall and some high rises.

Mrs. Brackbill, our team's teacher is in the background and next to her, on the far left in the background is Mr. Schulz, our team's engineer mentor. They made all of this possible and worked many, many hours helping our team prepare for this day.

Joel made 4 posters to use as visual aids in their presentations to the judges. This one demonstrated Waiani's geothermal power. To break the tension and stress, we enjoyed an entertaining presentation by Hatfield Corp. in which they demonstrated a wonderful accomplishment of a team of engineers in creating the Phillie Phanatic's Hot dog launcher!!!! This contraption can actually shoot out hotdogs all the way to the upper decks of the stadium during the Phillies' home games! I took several pictures, but the hotdogs shoot out so fast you can barely even see it flying out..... finally I got this picture in which you can see the foil wrapped hot dog in a bun as it is making it's speedy flight to the back of the auditorium!

At the end of the day, the 6 final teams presented their model cities on stage to a panel of final judges and were then asked several questions by the judges. Our team was the last to present and they did an excellent job although they came in 4th place. No pictures of the presentation unfortunately! This photographer was too nervous and wanted to watch without distraction of having to take pictures. I will probably be able to post others' pictures in the near future.

And even though they came in a disappointing 4th place out of 47 teams, the teams that beat them were very, very good! In fact two of the top teams this year won first place in previous years and each went on to the top 4 spots in the National Competition in Washington D.C.