photo by: Contributed photo

Members of West Middle School's Future City team Novaturia meet for a video conference call. The team, which features 10 eighth grade students, recently won the Future City Great Plains regional, qualifying for the national competition.

A group of Lawrence middle school students are blasting off to the moon to participate in a national competition that envisions future cities.

West Middle School’s 10-member Future City team earned the opportunity to compete in the organization’s national tournament after finishing first in the Great Plains regional recently.

Future City is an educational competition for middle school students that asks them to envision a way to make the world a better place. The competition challenges the students to research, design and build future cities with a focus on sustainability. For this year’s competition, the students needed to design a habitable base on the moon.

“I’m so pleased with all of the hard work they did,” said Jessica Miescher-Lerner, the team’s coach. “I’m over the moon about it, pun intended.”

West Middle School’s project, known as Novaturia, focused on building a domed-city on the earth’s orbiting satellite, Miescher-Lerner said. The team researched possible resources on the moon, including the moon’s soil and ice, and capturing solar energy from the sun.

Additionally, they developed an algae-based oxygen source for the interior of the dome, which serves as a home for moon-based inhabitants and provides safety from the radiation and meteorites in space.

“They really wanted to make a city that was filled with innovation, community and wellness as the pillars of their lunar life,” Miescher-Lerner said. “They tried to build a city that allowed them to reach those goals.”

While the project sounds like science fiction, the team’s moon city is based in reality. Miescher-Lerner said the project not only requires the team to think of new ways to sustain human life but provide supporting research and written explanations of how it could work. The team is also required to publicly present the project to judges.

As the coronavirus pandemic has continued into the new year, the Future City competitions have all been held virtually. The national competition later this month will continue that way.

Miescher-Lerner said the team members are scheduled to participate in different parts of the final competition over the next two weeks. An online livestream announcing the overall winners and special awards are scheduled for noon April 7.

Additionally, the public will get to have their own say on who they believe should win, which is new this year. From March 15 to April 2, the public will be able to vote for Best City of the Year. Both the voting and the virtual award ceremony will be held on the competition’s website, www.futurecity.org.

The students of Novaturia team include: Lois Xie, Anwen Williams, Gayla Goa, Tiffany Cindrell, Carter Jones, Zoe Cachiguango-Latta, Kinsey Lake, Henry Swinburne Romine, Lola Stuhlsatz and Mallory Thompson.

Lawrence’s Southwest Middle School team finished in second place in the national competition in 2020, when they where challenged to solve a water crisis 100 years in the future.