Sand Creek Engineering Club Captures Awards at National Competition

Posted january 20, 2012

The Sand Creek Middle School Engineering Club captured two awards at the National Engineer’s Week Future Cities Competition hosted by Hudson Valley Community College in January.

The Sand Creek team placed high out of the 30 schools from the Capital District that entered the competition and was recognize with the 2012 Excellence in the Design of a City award. Sand Creek earned several hundred dollars in rewards for these achievements.

Representing South Colonie at this event, under the direction of Sand Creek teacher Charles Nagel and Engineer Mentor Chris Babin, were students Kate Cole, Paris Martin, Tara Ilyadis, Hannah Carrow, and Alex Melas.

For the Future Cities Competition, the Engineering Club used Sim City 4 to design their “city of the future” on the computer, to advance the city, which the team named EOS (the Goddess of the New Dawn), to the year 2212. This city was worked on by eighth graders Jeff Cole, Tyler Knapp and Liam Dollard.

Students also had to choose a future energy source and write an essay describing how their city would utilize this energy source as well as other sustainable energies to improve on the health of the environment as well as EOS citizens.

Eighth graders Yasona Lika, Hannah Carrow Nicole Czwakiel and Cati Campbell wrote an essay describing how EOS would advance energy utilization in the future. On top of those two tasks, these Sand Creek students also had to build a 50” x 25” scale model of their city, requiring the use of recycled materials and a moving part to add difficulty. Sixth grader Lauren Mclaughlin-Kelly (Engineering Club President) headed the building of the model.

During the competition, students Hannah Carrow, Kate Cole and Alex Melas gave a seven-minute presentation about their school’s city, EOS, and answered five minutes of questions from a panel of three judges. The judges then added all of the points the team earned for their model, computer city, essay, presentation and narrative and compared them to the other 30 schools to determine the top-finishing schools.

To prepare for this event, the Engineering Club met after school for endless hours. Mr. Nagel and the students put tremendous effort into making sure South Colonie would be proudly represented at the regional event.