The ambition of Colorado Academy’s 2024-2025 Upper School Future City team is clear from the very first sentence of the original essay describing their entry into this annual international engineering and design competition:
Welcome to TideFlux: a city near Hawaii’s French Frigate Shoals providing a high-quality life to 20,000 climate refugee residents, while fostering nature regeneration.
Future City is a program of DiscoverE, a nonprofit dedicated to providing global resources, programs, and connections between K-12 students and engineers and STEM professionals. Now in its 33rd year, the competition challenges students to imagine, design, and build cities of the future. Future City’s theme for 2024-2025, “Above the Current,” focuses on the pressing issues of rising sea levels and climate change. The contest entry brief: Design a floating city while providing two innovative examples of how your floating city works and keeps its citizens healthy and safe.
Until now, Future City has been a program primarily for aspiring middle school engineers, with over 70,000 students from more than 1,800 schools across 37 U.S. regions, as well as teams from Canada, China, and Nigeria participating annually. This season was the first in which high school groups have been able to submit official entries in their own, separate competition.
Ninth Graders Jackson Hersch, Rahul Iyengar, and Seelye Siderius—all three veterans of CA’s award-winning Middle School Future City club—went into this year’s competition “unaffiliated,” meaning that they would compete without an official faculty sponsor. Instead, the TideFlux team relied on CA faculty “consultants,” parents, and other professionals as they worked long hours outside of school to complete their project in time to enter competition in early 2025. Iyengar’s mother, Myrna Moncayo-Iyengar, served as their coach.
The results of the team’s ambition? TideFlux earned second place on in the Future City National Finals, held February 18 in Washington, D.C., out of a field of more than 80 teams from around the world, netting scholarship awards for each team member as well as a cash prize.
According to Siderius, “We knew this was the first official year for Future City at the high school level, and the three of us were really interested in seeing how far we could get.”
The high school competition looks dramatically different from the version the Ninth Graders were familiar with after their two years on CA’s Middle School team, which made it to the national finals in both 2023 and 2024. Rather than build a city model from recycled cardboard, wood, clay, and other inexpensive materials—restrictions aimed at limiting costs and leveling the playing field for thousands of middle school competitors from around the world—high schoolers are required to complete their project in Autodesk Revit, a commercial-grade modeling software for architects, structural engineers, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineers, and contractors.
“Revit has a really big learning curve,” understates Siderius, who became the team’s computer-aided design (CAD) software expert. “We had to watch a lot of YouTube tutorials to learn how it works.”
But just like in the middle school program, high schoolers also submit a detailed essay describing their project, and they must present their work in front of a judging panel made up of industry professionals. It is the combination of deliverables—model, essay, and presentation—that earns a given team national glory.
Fortunately, the CA team’s combination of skills, experience, and drive proved to be a winning one.
A division of labor
All three team members contributed to every part of the project, but each also chose an area in which to specialize.
Says Siderius, “Revit wasn’t like any program we had used before, but I really enjoyed figuring out how to create realistic 3D models and then rendering them in the cloud.” Siderius’s work resulted in detailed architectural and engineering images that look like the ones a real design firm might include in a proposal for a huge urban development.
“When we talked to engineers for this project, they told us that nearly everything they do happens in Revit,” Siderius explains. “Today, that’s where the engineering design process starts.”
Iyengar, as the essay’s editor-in-chief and the manager of the team presentation, was able to craft an inspiring eco-narrative from what would otherwise have been dry, technical descriptions. The team consulted with CA Upper School science Instructor Dr. Leo Procise to revise the essay, benefiting from Procise’s PhD studies in oceanography as they envisioned a city in harmony with the French Frigate Shoals’ marine reserve, which is home to 40 species of coral, 600 types of marine invertebrates, and the endangered Hawaiian monk seal, among many other ocean-dwellers.
“TideFlux focuses on scientific research and on cleaning the environment,” notes Iyengar. At the end of the 21-page essay, he included a full eight pages of references, ranging from interviews with materials scientists and engineering consultants to technical articles on bioplastics, environmental adaptation, and solar energy storage.
Meanwhile Hersch, the team’s lead researcher, made the most of TideFlux’s location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, northwest of the Hawaiian islands and relatively close to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a focal point of their city vision. After coming upon the French Frigate Shoals one day on Google Earth and becoming curious about the remote region, Hersch explains, “The more we dove into it, the more we found that it was even better than we originally thought.” Along with the atoll’s incredible biodiversity, the team learned about its strategic role during World War II, when both Japan and the United States laid claim to one of its islands to stage naval operations.
“After the militaries abandoned the French Frigate Shoals, leftover chemicals and other harmful waste took a huge toll on the marine environment,” adds Hersch.
Then there’s the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of marine debris, mostly man-made microplastics, in the North Pacific. “Along with existing sustainably alongside the environment,” notes Iyengar, “our other big goal in TideFlux is to repair the damage.”
A demanding schedule
To complete their project, it took Hersch, Iyengar, and Siderius four to five hours every Saturday throughout the months between the start of the school year and January, when a virtual qualification round was held to determine the teams that would advance to the finals in February.
The team members also used early-morning meetings on CA’s Upper School late-start days and their daily study hall blocks to check in and review progress on project components and any approaching deadlines.
Most importantly, the Ninth Graders relied on CA faculty members and their referrals for guidance and expertise with the many technical aspects of TideFlux. The floating city exports innovative patents and construction materials made of detoxified plastics. Relying on drainage engineering and corrosion-resistant materials to mitigate tropical storms and salt, TideFlux is a “15-minute city” with mixed zones that offer healthy living. “Citizens walk/bike within module-clusters and take public boats to centralized schools/offices,” the essay states. “Residents work/train in STEM and other city functions. Repetitive work is automated.”
Meanwhile, a huge array of environmentally friendly technologies is deployed across TideFlux’s seven island-like clusters: sustainable construction methods and materials; phase-change materials and electrochromic glass for energy-efficient heating and cooling; fully-electrified transportation systems; comprehensive waste composting and sewage filtration; ocean wave and solar power sources, with energy storage provided by salt thermal batteries; and vertical farming and water desalination.
Many of their fellow competitors, notes Siderius, mentioned similar technological aspirations in their city designs, but, he says, “We really went into depth on how everything worked together.”
Observes Hersch, “It was clear to the judges that we understood our technologies and had done a lot of research on the benefits and tradeoffs.”
Balancing environmental pros against economic cons, one passage in their essay about the city’s transportation systems notes, “TideFlux cannot support an airport; thus we rely on helicopters to tap into Hawaii’s international connections. Vehicle-to-everything systems require uninterrupted wireless communications. We achieve this with short-wavelength cellular and weather-protected antennae. Walkways trade off brighter nighttime illumination to protect marine ecosystems.”
Often, adds Iyengar, less experienced teams try to wave the magic wand of artificial intelligence to solve all their city’s challenges; with all their previous CA Future City experience, “We knew we had to include a diverse range of technologies. Everything is designed to address specific issues.”
Their years of experience also meant that the CA team members got to sit on a judging panel in the middle school competition, where they appreciated those groups who, just like them, could make the hows and whys of the most minute elements in their designs easy to understand.
Judging the middle schoolers, says Iyengar, only underscored the complexity of the Future City challenge—and the vast range of talents and skills needed to win.
“The presentation can actually earn more points than any of the other project deliverables,” rewarding those teams, like CA’s, that not only display their engineering and design chops, but also communicate their ideas effectively in front of a live audience as well as in written and graphic form.
“We have all those skills,” Siderius says. At CA, the world’s future engineers, innovators, and entrepreneurs don’t merely specialize to excel in a single field. They know that language, presence, understanding, and the aspiration to do more are all essential ingredients, no matter what path they may choose.