Southwest Middle School to compete at national Future City competition

Abdullah Ahmed, an eighth-grader at Southwest Middle School, explains the layout of a re-imagined Jakarta he helped build as part of his school's eighth-grade Future City team, on Thursday, Feb. 9, 2017.

This week, Danielle Lotton-Barker will board a plane to Washington, D.C., where her students are due to compete in the national Future City competition against some 30 teams from middle schools across the country. It’s exciting, to be sure, but it’s also not her first time making the journey.

“This is our fourth year we’ve made it to nationals,” says Lotton-Barker, who sponsors the highly decorated Future City teams at Southwest Middle School.

“You feel almost greedy saying that out loud,” she admits. Still, Lotton-Barker, now in her ninth year coaching Southwest’s engineering-inclined Future City teams, isn’t shy about sharing her students’ accomplishments. Engineering teacher Jamie Shaw joined her last semester as co-coach.

At Southwest, there’s a lot to celebrate. The school’s eighth-grade team — the worldwide competition encourages kids to imagine, design and build their own cities — beat out 56 other teams from Kansas, Missouri and Colorado for the first-place title at last month’s regional contest at Kansas State University. And soon, they’ll be heading to the nation’s capital to present their winning project, a reimagined version of Jakarta, Indonesia, they’ve named Teratai after the Indonesian word for “lotus.”

“I feel like we definitely have a good chance because of our high-quality buildings and innovations,” says Abdullah Ahmed, one of three Southwest eighth-graders set to present Teratai at the national competition. “And we have a big team with a wide skill set, so we should be able to creatively adjust to any situation we’re put in.”

The theme for this year’s competition is “The Power of Public Space.” A key component of Future City is sustainability, and Lotton-Barker’s eighth graders have envisioned a Teratai 140 years in the future that has effectively conquered the overcrowding, pollution and other issues plaguing contemporary Jakarta. All thanks to Teratai’s talented team of engineers, of course.

Students worked with their coaches and their engineer mentor, Christopher Storm of Lawrence’s Landplan Engineering, to develop and build the design. In Teratai, residents travel on high-speed trains that run on low-friction magnets. The city’s power is supplied mostly by nuclear fusion, and its once-heavily polluted Ciliwung River has been transformed into a popular public space kept clean by pollutant-filtering sensors, aquatic drones and genetically modified bioluminescent bacteria.

Its crown jewel, a sprawling park called The JRP, allows visitors to explore virtual, interactive biomes via biodegradable “reactive reality” patches small enough to be worn behind your ear.

That “big team” Ahmed mentioned is composed of 29 students, a jump from previous years, says Lotton-Barker. Working together as a team, she says, particularly one as large as Southwest’s, has been a challenge for her eighth-graders. But these aspiring engineers welcome challenges gladly.

Sometimes, co-presenter Spencer Ware says, there’s conflict between teammates. Still, it’s good training for “the real world,” as he puts it, “where you might be with an engineering team and you have to work with lots of other people.”

Emily Bial, his other co-presenter for Teratai, agrees.

“I think we definitely learned a lot about problem-solving and how to work through when everybody has such different ideas,” she says. That, and learning “how to think about futuristic ideas in terms of the problems, because if we don’t think about the future, we aren’t going anywhere.”

She and her teammates have spent the past five months thinking about the future. There’s the future of Teratai, of course, and the less-distant future of the national Future City competition. Their process began in August, with work sessions during class and after school. Once January rolled around, kids began meeting over winter break, and then every day after school, in anticipation of the regional competition.

The environment in Lotton-Barker’s classroom has traditionally been pretty “intense” this time of year, she says. One former student tracked the “thousands of hours” spent on Future City over the course of a school year. These kids are committed, she says, and she’s proud of them.

“I think because of the culture we’ve developed and the high expectations they have, they do extend an exceptional amount of work for this. Because I think they hold themselves to pretty high goals, they understand that you don’t get there by accident,” Lotton-Barker says. “The previous teams didn’t get there because they wanted to. They got there because they worked hard.”

The Future City organization has pledged to send the team’s three presenters, coaches and engineering mentor to nationals, which will take place Feb. 17-21. Lotton-Barker hopes to take the rest of the team with them, and a fundraising campaign set up by Southwest parents is working toward that goal. As of this week, Lotton-Barker says, they’re probably halfway there.

As Teratai co-presenter, Emily Bial, one of a handful of girls on her team, is already guaranteed a spot at the national competition. And she’s ready.

“It means a lot,” she says of competing. “It’s kind of crazy, continuing the legacy of Southwest.”

Donations to Southwest’s Future City team can be made through PayPal at futurecitysw@gmail.com. Checks made out to “Future City SW” can also be deposited at any Peoples Bank location.