Future City 2024

Challenge: Electrify Your Future (Design a 100% electrically powered city)
When: Saturday, January 13, 2024 from 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM (times approximate)
Where: Rutgers University – Piscataway Campus

For years, PMINJ volunteers have supported Future City.

Future City's mission is to provide a fun and exciting educational engineering program for 6th, 7th & 8th grade students that combine a stimulating engineering challenge with a “hands-on” application to present their vision of a city of the future while solving a current real-life “challenge”

Students start in the fall and present their city at the NJ Regional Competition in January. In recent years the regional competition has grown to over 500 participating students, teachers, and mentors. Feedback from both students and teachers has been exceedingly positive, with exclamations of an excellent engineering experience!

PMINJ is proud to partner with NJ Future City, and to support it on its mission to advance STEM learning in Middle Schools. You can help now by volunteering today!

Send your interest to or .

Our presence includes:

• Represent PMINJ at “Meet the Professionals” session. In a Career Fair of sorts, engage students one-on-one at the PMINJ table to answer their questions about project management and what it might mean to them in the future. Also engage with them to help them identify that the Future City project started their career as a project manager.
• Serve as a presentation judge, scoring students’ models and oral presentations on campus at Rutgers. Competition Day runs from 8 to 4 with breakfast, lunch, and scheduled breaks. Judges are invited and encouraged to spend the whole day, but if you can’t, Future City will work with you to enable you to judge for those hours you can provide.
• Present Project Management 101 to event participants. Chapter members have been assigned to preset to all students in small groups as they rotate through the learning events of the day. The PowerPoint presentation identifies the project management phases that the students should have experienced to deliver their projects for the competition.

See additional details from the FutureCity Coordinator
Pictures from the 2020 competition.
See pictures of PMINJ participation in past years

Be a Mentor:

1. What is a Mentor? – As a Mentor your job will be to coordinate with the team’s teacher to provide advice, guidance, and technical assistance to the students as they work on the various project deliverables. Much can be done virtually – a few hours a week. A program manual and Futurecity.org contain guidance.
   • Help students stay on task, focus on “big picture”, perfect submissions, polish their presentation and build their models.
   • Flexible commitment – typically 20 – 40 hours (much virtual) between now and January.
   • Training guides and other support are available
   For more information about your role as a mentor go to:
   https://futurecity.org/participants/mentors
2. Where are Mentors Needed? - Mentors are needed at Middle Schools throughout New Jersey. More schools request help weekly. For the current list of schools, and more information on mentoring, contact: Jacqueline Nam, at mentor@futurecitynj.org
3. When? – Mentors are Urgently Needed for many Middle schools now through early January. It’s never too late to start supporting a school.
4. How to Start – Register on line at www.futurecity.org/register then contact: Jacqueline Nam, at mentor@futurecitynj.org to get paired with the Middle School of your choice.
5. What if I don’t have time now to Mentor? – No problem! Other volunteer opportunities also exist for Judging starting remotely mid-December and at the January 13, 2024 Competition Day – contact: Andrea Almeida, at judging@futurecitynj.org or Silvia Santos, at competition_day@futurecitynj.org to learn more. Also check: https://futurecity.org/participants
6. May I Share this Invitation – Absolutely! The need is urgent. Please share this information with friends / coworkers who may be interested in helping between now and January 13th.

For more information on mentoring, contact: Mentor Coordinator: Jacqueline Nam - mentor@futurecitynj.org

Be a Judge

Judging coordinator: Andrea Almeida - judging@futurecitynj.org

• Remote judging of essays and other deliverables start November 10th.
• Additional Judges are needed on Competition Day.

This Year's Challenge:

Every day, all around the world, people plug in and power up. From air conditioning to automobiles, electricity gives us the power to innovate and advance technology beyond our wildest dreams. There is a growing consensus that future cities will be powered completely by electricity that is clean and green!

This year's Future City Competition challenges middle school students to explore what clean, green, and renewable energy sources could power the electrical grid our future cities? How would these energy sources generate enough electricity for industry, transportation, agriculture, residential, and commercial use? And to imagine what future cities will be like when engineers find and implement solutions to the challenge of electrifying our cities!

Students will research, imagine, and design future cities that are fully electric and powered by energy sources to keep their citizens and the environment healthy and safe.

The Students Learn to Succeed!

• Presentation Skills - Talking can be hard. The program helps to build confidence!
• Problem Solving - The program helps teach students that every problem is just waiting to be solved!
• What is Engineering - Many students don't understand what engineers do. We give students the opportunity to speak to and learn from real engineers!
• Teamwork - The program shows that no matter how hard you look, there is no I in Team!