OLIVESBURG — Imagine a world with zero waste — one with no trash cans or landfills, where even air pollution can be recycled.
A group of Crestview Middle School students did just that to win the top honor in a statewide STEM competition.
Crestview’s model metropolis took first place in the Ohio region’s DiscoverE Future City competition, earning seven special awards and a spot in the finals. The team beat out 29 other schools, including runner up Indian Hill Middle School of Cincinnati and third place winner St. Ambrose Catholic School in Brunswick.
Future City is a project-based learning program where students research, design and build cities of the future. Each year, students are given a specific problem and must create a futuristic city that addresses the issue. This year’s challenge was to create a waste-free city with a circular economy.
“We typically just do a linear economy, create it, use it, throw it away for the most part,” said teacher Jennifer Blackledge. “They investigated how to collect it back, break it down into its parts, manufacture something new and then distribute it to be sold.”
Future City is open to teams of sixth, seventh and eight grade students. Crestview’s team developed their project during a semester-long course taught by Blackledge, the middle school’s computer science teacher.
The students dreamed up a two-tiered metropolis with an underground recycling and manufacturing center. Even air pollution was recycled, harnessed and used to fuel airplanes.
“They’re actually doing research now on using CO2 for engines, so they created that,” Blackledge said.
Crestview’s city, NewTree Evergeen, has mixed layout with commercial and residential buildings side by side. The hoverbus offers a public transit option that runs using a system of magnets. Pedestrians can walk along the street or inside a tube walkway with a conveyor belt that weaves between buildings. Other features include a hospital, school, dog and people parks and a children’s museum.
In the center of town, residents can take refuse items and send them down to the recycling center through a network of tubes.
There’s even a bamboo forest — a sensible option since bamboo grows faster than trees and can be used to make a variety of items from toilet paper to textiles.
But Future City projects involve far more than building a model. Students started by researching solutions, then explained their work and research in an essay, skit and question-and-anwer slideshow. Each team was also required to submit a project plan.
“The project plan shows how we organized our time, how we set deadlines and how we focused on the strengths of our team to have them perform their best,” Blackledge said.
This year’s Future City class consisted of 13 students. They were originally broken up into teams, but decided to combine after they found out the project deadline was a month earlier than last year.
“I honestly think it was one of the best ideas that we could have came up with because focusing on everybody’s strengths was key,” Blackledge said.
The team included Jonathon Moore, Erica Davisson, James Stevens, Deryn Moore, Scarlett Allison, Kennedy Lehman, Caden Bistline, Monte Cline, Brayden Parrigan, Carson Metcalf, Zachery Peterman, Bronson Rose and Marc Salser.
In addition to winning first place, Crestview was named best architectural model, best moving part, best use of recycled materials, best recreational area, most environmentally friend city, best use of transportation and best project plan.
The “Most Environmentally Friendly” award was sponsored by the Ohio EPA. For this award, cities were evaluated on their plan for handling outflows from industrial, commercial and residential waste streams. The award called for recycling strategies and advanced energy plants that minimize pollution, along with treatment techniques and efforts to keep effluent streams away from residential areas, green spaces and water sources.
Team presenter Erica Davisson can still remember watching the live-streamed awards ceremony, astounded as her team racked up special awards and then first place.
“It kept on saying Crestview and I’m just sitting there in shock, like ‘Oh my God this is really happening!’ ” she said.
Deryn Moore said she was especially proud of the win because she and most of her teammates live in the country. They didn’t benefit from background knowledge about cities like some of their competitors from larger schools.
Instead, the class spent time playing a city planning simulation game called Cities: Skylines to learn about infrastructure, zoning and essential services.
Scarlet Allison wrote the team’s presentation skit, which incorporated time travel storylines and mock TV ads. Allison said Future City is a good learning experience because its largely self-guided. Students do their own research and come up with their own ideas.
Her classmates agreed.
“It gives you individuality over most projects in school,” said Jonathon Moore. “It’s like a break from school when you come in here.”
Davisson said the class has increased her interest in a STEM career.
“I was looking to into engineering before and I think this is just bumped it up a bit more,” she said.
The students represented Ohio in the part one of the national finals on Saturday and will continue with the special awards competition on Feb. 12. The competition continues Feb. 12 and results will be released next month.
