CMMS competes in Future City
Max Spallinger working on the backdrop for the city.
The completed Cosmic Metropolis.
Five students from Canonsburg Middle School’s Gifted Program took part in the 2014 Future City Competition at the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh. CMMS students earned an honorable mention at the competition. This was the school’s fifth year competing.
The Future City Competition is a national, project-based learning experience where students in grades 6-8 imagine, design and build cities of the future. For the students at CMMS, this cross-curricular project ran from October to January.
Eighth-graders April Giles and Esmee DeCortie, and seventh-graders Braden Johnson, Max Spallinger and Priya Ray stayed after school every week to complete research and design and construct a city. Their city, Cosmic Metropolis, was located in space and operated as a hub-and-spoke system in which the main “hub” was the downtown area and the nodes were its suburbs.
To help guide the students during the project, gifted teacher Pam Moniodes recruited science teacher Chris Nairn and engineer Bob Terwillinger. Nairn has done the project in the past and provided students with insight on how the competition works. Terwillinger, a civil engineer, helped the students gain a better understanding of how things are built. This project gave students an opportunity to do what engineers do such as identifying problems, brainstorming ideas and working as a team.