The Future City Competition is a national program sponsored by the engineering community to promote an interest in technology and engineering in middle school students through hands-on, real world applications. The competition is open to seventh and eighth grade students in public, private and parochial schools within participating regions of the United States. Regional winners compete in the national finals, a featured event during National Engineers Week.

The competition is team based, with each team comprised of three students, a teacher sponsor and an engineer mentor and has four phases:

PHASE 1:

DESIGN

The team develops a future city design using SimCity 4 Deluxe software. When the city design is complete, the team submits for the first round of judging.

PHASE 2:

BUILD

Using the software design created in Phase 1, the team builds a scale model of a section of their city. The purpose of the model is to give a 3-D representation of how one section of the teams’ future city would look.

The model must contain one moving part, such as a transportation or communications component. There is a $100 limit on the materials used in the physical model, so most teams use "found" items to create their city. The physical models are judged independently of Phase 1 results.

PHASE 3:

WRITE

Each student team writes an essay explaining their response to a specific engineering challenge. This year’s challenge was to,

 "Provide an affordable green living space for

people who have lost their home to a disaster or financial emergency."

In addition, the students write an abstract describing the key features of their city design.

PHASE 4:

PRESENT

Each student team gives a timed presentation of their city to a panel of judges, then they answer questions from the judges related to their city’s design.

REGIONAL RESULTS

Scores from the software city model, physical model, essay and team presentation are added together to determine the regional winners. Each qualifying region sends one team to the national competition.

NATIONAL FINALS

During the preliminary round, after the judges have reviewed the models and essays, the regional winners make another presentation to a panel of judges. After this round, the five teams with the top accumulated scores will become the national finalists. These finalists present their cities to a panel of celebrity judges. The team with the best presentation, model, essay and city design as determined by the celebrity judges will become the national winner.