Gratton 7th-graders take winning plan for Detroit to D.C.

A reimagined Detroit – flying robo-cars whizzing between its skyscrapers, streets now parks and jogging paths – captured first place among middle school Future City presentations from Northern California.

The kids who reimagined it, seventh-graders from Gratton School in Denair, will be flying their presentation to Washington, D.C., this week to compete in the national Future City competition Feb. 18-21.

For teacher Rexann Casteel, this will be the third year she has made the trip, each time with a fresh set of young champions. The 2015 team placed ninth in the nation. The 2016 group came in 21st against roughly 40 teams that made it to the national level.

Her secret? From the start, she has her students compete against the very best.

“We looked up the winning essays and models online, watched the presentations on YouTube,” Casteel said.

Students know what caliber of performance is expected, even from a tiny school in rural Stanislaus County. Gratton School is a one-campus elementary district serving 137 kids. Casteel’s 15 students are all the seventh-graders there are.

Eighth-grader Peter Wagner, a presenter on the national stage last year, served as adviser for this year’s contestants. His advice? Be prepared for unexpected questions. Wagner said he panicked when a national Future City judge in 2016 asked him how they excavated their subway system.

“I told him a nuclear bomb excavated it,” he said with a rueful smile. It went all downhill from there, he said, as the judge immediately asked about how the city had coped with the radiation and other consequences Wagner had never considered.

Knowing the technical details matters in a contest dreamed up by engineers.

Future City is part of the DiscoverE foundation, which now includes the National Engineers Week contest. This year the theme is the “Power of Public Spaces,” with students designing a city at least 100 years in the future around common ground. Past themes have tackled stormwater management, transportation and urban agriculture.

Casteel’s class divvied up the contest parts: the virtual city design created in “SimCity”; the 1,500-word essay describing all the innovations and features of the city; the city model made of recycled materials and at least one moving part; the project’s organizational plan and timeline; and a scripted presentation given by three team members.

The class named its city Halcyon (pronounced hal-see-on) Sound, meaning happy, prosperous and secure. The kids devised a city powered by clean, geothermal heat, with centralized services and towering apartment buildings all run by intelligent technology that knows user preferences. Clothing has nanobots in the fabric, able to heal minor cuts, diagnose minor illnesses or call for help if needed.

They copied the street layout of downtown Detroit after learning roughly 20 percent of the city’s buildings had been abandoned. Its architectural legacy remains intact in the Halcyon Sound historic section, which includes the existing baseball park and football stadium. The asphalt roadways of the city center they repurposed as bike paths and jogging trails, flanked by grassy areas and vegetable gardens.

Classmates voted Natalie Caulkins, Conner LaRosa and Evan Johns to be presenters. They and four technical assistants – to put the model back together after shipping – will be among the travel contingent of 25 heading to Washington. The contest pays for five people, and families will pay their own way.

The contest challenges kids in sixth through eighth grades to look at the infrastructure challenges of today and think up solutions. The century-later focus scoots past the limits of existing technology, the costs and the political wrangling it would take to execute wholesale makeovers.

The contest began 25 years ago as a way to get youths interested in engineering careers, and organizers report 68 percent of participants say they are looking at careers in the field after being a part of the contest. In 2015, 40,000 students took part in the Future City competition, 49 percent of them girls.

This story was originally published February 12, 2017 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Gratton 7th-graders take winning plan for Detroit to D.C.."