Congratulations to Stratford School’s
2023 Future City Engineering Competition Winners!

Stratford Preparatory’s Flambe Bay Team took 1st Place and will advance to the National Competition!

Stratford Pleasanton Middle School’s Viridis City was awarded 2nd Place, and Stratford Fremont Middle School’s Cerulean City took 3rd Place. Additional Stratford Middle School Teams from Fremont, Milpitas, Palo Alto, San Jose, San Francisco, and Stratford Preparatory also took home individual design awards and honorable mentions.
*See the full list of winning teams below.

This year’s Future City Competition challenge asked students to address climate change in their city. Using their engineering skills, Stratford middle school students worked to design a future city incorporating their own creative and forward-thinking solutions to help alleviate some of the most immediate issues brought on by climate change in our local communities and throughout the world.

Stratford students in our 7th and 8th-grade engineering classes have been busy working on their climate change projects alongside their dedicated teachers since September last year. Future City uses the engineering design process as a framework to guide students through the creation of their cities. Students apply specific project management methods within this framework to keep their projects on track. This structure gives students a real-world learning experience that they can apply to future challenges in school, work, and life.

What is Future City?
The Future City project challenges students to explore the complexities of city design and sustainability to experiment with ideas for their own future city. Students then draft a city description essay with their solution to the “Addressing Climate Change” challenge, create a two-dimensional map of the city, and use these ideas to build their city model with recyclables from their own homes. The physical model(s) must have at least one moving part, be built to scale, and may not exceed the $100 expense requirement. 

Presenting Their Future City Designs
On the day of the competition, teams displayed their models and gave a 7-minute virtual presentation discussing the features of their future city and their solution to the climate change challenge. The presentation round was followed by the judges’ 5–8 minute question and answer period.

The top 5 teams presented their solution in front of the audience and answered the questions asked by the panel of judges. Scores from the deliverables, model and presentation were used to declare the final winners. To learn more about the Future City Competition, visit https://futurecity.org/.

Stratford Middle School students, we salute you for your dedication, innovative ideas, and tireless efforts to bring those ideas to fruition. A heartfelt thank you to our fantastic Engineering elective teachers who have worked tirelessly preparing the students for this competition. Hat’s off to all of our amazing student engineers. We look forward to all the tremendous things you will do in the future.

To learn more about our Middle School programs, visit www.stratfordschools.com/our-programs/middle-school/.