St. Paul of the Cross School Wins Third Consecutive Illinois (Chicago) Regional Future City Competition

For the third consecutive year, St. Paul of the Cross School's Future City Team won first place at the Chicago Region's Future City Competition with Vida Sierra, a new city to be built with the ability to produce its own food sources. 34 teams competed at the Regional Competition at The University of Illinois Chicago on January 24, 2015.

The members of the winning student team are Lizzy Balentine, Triona O'Broin, Brendan Knapp, Jared Lombardi, Angelica Lorenzo, Ian Coyle, Roberta Spagnolo, Adan Mulvaney, Charlie Romano, and Aiden Jurcenko. The students are led by educators Christine Stypka and Laurie Moran and engineer mentor Philip Spagnolo.

The team has qualified for a trip to the Future City National Competition in Washington, D.C. after winning the Chicago Regional Competition. Students will journey with their coaches and mentor to Nationals, February 14-18, where they will compete with the rest of the country's winning teams.

More than 40,000 middle school students from 1350 schools in 37 regions nationally have been tasked with FEEDING FUTURE CITIES - Designing a city with its own food sources. The Future City Competition is a national, project-based learning experience where middle school students imagine, design, and build cities of the future. Students work as a team with an educator and engineer mentor to plan cities using SimCity™ software; research and write solutions to an engineering problem; build tabletop scale models with recycled materials costing no more than $100; and present their ideas before judges at Regional Competitions in January.

Congratulations to the students on their outstanding achievement.