Future city Competition: where imagination & discipline meet

Introduction

The Future City Competition is fun, innovative, challenging, practical, and full of imagination. This program provides an opportunity for middle-school students to work in small teams with their peers in order to create a unique city model that meets all the constraints of the program rubric. Under the guidance of a teacher, the participants engage in the engineering design process to construct a scale model of a fully functioning city, complete with a minimum of at least one moving part that may indicate features such as transportation systems, or waste management processes.

Discipline & Imagination: Goals and a Sense of Control

Within the Future City Competition rubric, there are specific constraints that allow a student to understand the expectations for their design, yet there is a plethora of room for the students to use their imagination in accomplishing them. Research shows that the assessment practices used by a teacher or program shed light on what is valuable and what students should aim to achieve or demonstrate (Butler, 2006). When students can see the expectations ahead of time, such as the rubric in The Future City Competition, they have the information necessary to discipline themselves and their creativity in order to meet the requirements. For example: according to the rubric, the city must have at least one moving part, and be constructed mostly of recycled materials. These parameters set a precedent for what their city will have and be constructed of but beyond that, students are free to imagine their own innovative ways of accomplishing the goal. Within this context students can enter into an experience of “flow” as they assess whether or not their creative ideas are progressing them toward their goal (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).

Discipline & Imagination: Engaging in Challenging Activity

Future City is meant to provide an appropriate level of challenge for its middle-school participants. The level of challenge requires that a mentor or teacher be available to offer guidance and direction. To prevent the challenge from overwhelming the students it is broken up into achievable steps that allow the teams to work on one item at time or determine to divide responsibilities strategically amongst themselves according to their interest and strengths. Along the way the teacher is able to provide feedback as each step or milestone is reached. This feedback is meant to be informational rather than controlling and is meant to reinforce the students for successfully completing an optimal challenge: this could include congratulations as well as suggestions for increased productivity or hints at subtle design improvements. The result of feedback offered in such a way is sustained intrinsic satisfaction for the students (Brophy, 1981). Csikszentmihalyi suggests that, in activities that demand the exercise of certain skills, “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act” (1990). Future City’s design allows for a teacher to oversee that the teamwork, competition, and creativity offer the ideal level of stimuli for engagement to fall within this zone each step along the way.

Discipline & Imagination: Focused on the Task and Caught-Up in the Activity

Student testimonies reveal that the Future City Competition involves them so deeply that they are conscious of the task even when away from the classroom, and the rest of their team. They are engrossed in the responsibility of observations and the collection of supplies. They practice new engineering skills that they may not have previously thought to engage in if it weren’t for the cause of making their city the best it can possibly be. This is a characteristic of Csikszentmihalyi’s explained Flow experience. He illustrates that Flow experiences act as a “magnet for learning”—they constantly encourage personal growth to meet the challenges of novel situations (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). Students confess that the Future City Competition leaves them familiar with engineering terms and processes at a level they would not have achieved apart from the creative experience. The students are united with their fellow participants by the common goal of creativity and healthy competition. This unification helps them to offer their own ideas and overcome disagreements in order to make the best decisions for the city.

Conclusion

The Future City Competition provides an opportunity for students to work together, learn, and challenge themselves amidst healthy and productive competition. It also provides an outline for effective project-based learning that can be replicated by a teacher in his or her classroom apart from the competition itself.

References

Brophy, J. E. (1981). Teacher praise: A functional analysis. Review of Educational Research, 51, 5–32.

Butler, R. (2006). Are mastery and ability goals both adaptive? Evaluation, initial goal construction and the quality of task engagement. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 78, 210-216.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper. ———. (1997) Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New

York: Basic Books.

Future City Update. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://futurecity.org/

Garland, W. J. (2006). Chapter Seven: FINDING FLOW THROUGH DISCIPLINE AND IMAGINATION. In Different Three Rs for Education (pp. 87–102). Brill / Rodopi.

Reiser, R. A., & Dempsey, J. V. (2018). Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. Boston, MA: Pearson.