🏙️🌱✨ Students at Cane Creek Middle School are designing the future from the classroom!
Seventh graders spent two months collaborating on the Future City national competition, a hands-on, cross-curricular STEM program that challenges students to design a city 100-plus years in the future. Guided by English Language Arts (ELA) teacher Ariel Warden, students worked in teams to research, write, design, and present solutions to the real-world problem of food waste, showing how ELA skills connect directly to science, math, and sustainability.
"I realized I am more capable of doing hard things than I thought,” one student remarked. “I thought this project was gonna be impossible, but we did it.”
The project aligned with multiple ELA standards, including research, writing, speaking, and listening, while also incorporating science and math concepts like climate change, sustainability, and scale modeling. Through consistent teamwork, students learned how to compromise, manage time, and organize complex tasks.
In November, student teams presented their cities to two neutral judges using official Future City rubrics. The six-student winning team designed Okanagan City, a future city in British Columbia that reduces food waste through rooftop gardens and chickens. Their work earned them a spot at the regional Future City competition in Raleigh on Jan. 24.
