Holy Family School earns second place

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Neighbors | Submitted.Holy Family School's Future City Team earned a second place out of nineteen teams at state competition last month. They were also recognized for Best Use of Water Resources Engineering and received an Honorable Mention for Best Research Essay.

Holy Family School’s Future City team earned second place out of nineteen teams at state competition last month.

They were also recognized for “Best Use of Water Resources Engineering” and received an honorable mention for “Best Research Essay.”

The engineering project was envisioned by twenty-six sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students at Holy Family, a Lumen Christi Catholic School. The students participating were asked to design a city, research a solution to a social problem and then build a model of the city using recycled materials. The Holy Family team chose Youngstown as the city they would design in its future form. The students were led by science teacher Charlotte Eskay and parent mentors Carl and Pam Brockway.

The year is 2172 and the future Youngstown, Ohio includes robotic nurses, advanced GPS devices, hydroelectric energy from waste water plants and a high-speed highway powered by wind energy. The Future City team at Holy Family successfully fulfilled the requirement of “Feeding Future Cities,” the theme of this year’s national competition. They had to select one vegetable and one protein that could grow in a city and feed that city’s population. The team met with two local food producers: The Lettuce People, a company that grows hydroponic lettuce, and Big Cricket Farms who produce edible cricket food items. The team had chosen their “future city” to become self-sufficient by incorporating two locally produced food sources: crickets and kale.

They also visited the aquaponics lab at Choffin Career Center, where they learned about the benefits of growing indoors in a geodesic dome structure. The students on the Future City Team were introduced to the basics of engineering by designing virtual cities using Sim-City software. They researched and wrote an engineering solution to a social need of their city. Recycled materials were used to build scale models of their city and finally, they wrote a narrative and presented their project solutions to judges.

The 2015 Holy Family School Future City team includes (Grade 8) Michael Appugliese, Stephen Babik, Hannah Balash, Jayda Benson, Paige Brockway, Blake DelSignore, Anthony Formichelli, Chloe Housteau, Simone Izzo, James Maruca, J.T. Ogden, A.J. Pepperney, Matthew Rossi, Angelina Sabatino, Jenna Timko, David Varley, J.P. Yerian; (Grade 7) Margaret Faur, Gemma Kearns; (Grade 6) Patrick Assion, Megan Brockway, Veronica Brown, Nick LaPlante, Colin McDonald, Jacob Shogren and Ava Wilson.