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Fort Wayne Mayor Tom Henry has passed away after a brief battle with cancer.

Junior High Students Bring "Future City" Ideas To PFW

Zach Bernard/WBOI News

Students from around Northeast Indiana took part in the eighteenth annual Future City competition at Purdue University Fort Wayne this weekend.

The national contest encourages junior high students to build models of their “city of the future,” usually with a theme, bolstering STEM principles along the way. This year, students were instructed to design a power grid that could withstand and recover from a natural disaster.

Carol Dostal is the Indiana Future City coordinator, and also works serves as outreach director for PFW’s college of engineering, technology and computer science. She hopes the program gets students thinking about engineering professionally.

“We need more engineers in the future, and of course as a university and as a college that offers majors in this field, we want them to come on campus and know this is something we do, and we care about we’d like them to participate in,” said Dostal.

12 teams advanced to the national finals in D.C., and Blackhawk Middle School topped them all. 

Nick Balmoria has entered Blackhawk into the contest for all eighteen years Future City has been in Fort Wayne. Their city was based on the side of a mountain in Japan, due to the seismic impact of natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis on the nation.

The main emphasis of the model was its computer-generated sea wall, which aim to decrease the impact of a natural disaster.

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“After we came up with the idea, I teach science and for my unit I happened to find a video about a computer-generated sea wall they want to build in Japan called the ‘Sea of Japan Sea Wall,’ and I saw that after we actually made ours, so someone’s actually trying to do it in reality,” Balmoria said.

For Balmoria and his students, this was validating. The judges agreed, giving them top marks among all teams. Winners of Saturday’s contest get the chance to participate in the national competition in Washington D.C., in mid-February.

Zach joined 89.1 WBOI as a reporter and local host for All Things Considered, and hosted Morning Edition for the past few years. In 2022, he was promoted to Content Director.