Future City was a real eye opener for me. It was as time consuming as Robotics was for our school, hours of work, but still the joy of having fun.

Future City consisted of four parts:
The Sim City
The Essay
The Model
The Presentation

The Sim City was a virtual city made using Sim City 4. I mainly worked on that part, spending most of my Thanksgiving break accomplishing the task.
The Essay was written by two 7th graders on our team, each with extraordinary skill of writing, which I hope I can obtain as I enter my High School and College years.
The Model was the main time user. It took us hours to brainstorm and create our 3-D model, which took time to paint and assemble with a moving part.
The Presentation was a 7 minute long speech to explain our model and to tie the city to our overall subject:Water.

Yesterday was the region competition, it was a day long event, leaving no time for homework or other things because of its excitement and anxiety. I reminded me so much of BEST Robotics Competition, with different rounds with scores and finally the big announcement, complete with awards and the first place winner, able to move up to the national level. Our region was really quite small, because a teammate said that our school, which had 5 teams this year, scared most of the others off last year because our school got almost all the awards. But that still didn’t stop the competition to have a clear winner. At the end the difference between first and second was only 0.5 points in a total score of 400. 1/2 of a point! Think of that!
That is how our team, a team that used to be two separate teams, merging into one instead of fighting each other for the top spot, came in first. Now we are going to Nationals and I’m excited for it!

I’ve learned that, in future city, you need a leader. At the beginning of our model phase, we spent a considerable amount of time playing games and being off topic, losing about 20 hours of lost productivity (total). I think that was because we were at the boring part, mostly design and thoughts…
After we started the building phase, we started to have more participation, but still the jobs were limited because one had to be done before the other could start. Finally, we were able to get the majority of people to start doing something, after the landscape was built.

In summary,
I really enjoyed future city, wishing that I joined when I was younger and had more free time… I wish that we had even more people that joined our team. That would’ve made it so easy to finish to project and have a deep pool of knowledge to extract from.