A team of students from Islip Middle School has won the New York City Regional National Engineers Week Future City® competition. The winning students, Chris Lopez, Kenny Ortega, Jack Morrissey, teamed up with their teacher, Julia Johnson. The competition took place at the SONY Wonder Technology Lab in Midtown Manhattan on January 14, 2012.
They will now travel to Washington DC to compete in the 19th Annual Future City National Finals (www.futurecity.org), scheduled for February 19-21, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City, Virginia. The National Finals grand prize is a trip to Space Camp in Alabama, provided by National Finals host Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for the infrastructure that sustains our world. The second place team receives $5,000 from the National Society of Professional Engineers and third place wins $2,000 from IEEE-USA for their schools’ technology programs. Shell is also a national sponsor for the competition.
"We heard some really innovative ideas from the students this year, the students' creativity is always very inspiring" says Regional Coordinator, Karen Armfield, P.E. who is civil engineer at AECOM. In the New York City Region, this program is planned jointly between the ASCE Met Section and the SONY Wonder Technology Museum. The program is also supported by our many sponsors from the engineering community; AECOM, ARUP, Parsons Brinckerhoff, HDR, Langan, MESC, Thornton Tomasetti, Halcrow and National Grid.
"Supporting the communities where we live and work is critical to National Grid, so we're happy to partner with the New York Metropolitan Region Future City Competition," said Ken Daly, President of National Grid for New York. "Our 'Engineering Our Future' program is designed to encourage young people to study science, technology, engineering and math, and the Future City Competition dovetails perfectly with that effort.
New York City runners up include:
Second place school: Mark Twain I.S. 239 of Brooklyn
Third place school: Immaculate Conception of Manhattan
Fourth place school: Columbia Secondary School of Manhattan
More than 35,000 students from 1,300 middle schools in 37 regions across the country are participating in the Future City regional competitions. For those wishing to compete in next year’s competition, please contact Karen Armfield at (212) 701-2808 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it