Participating in the Future City engineering competition that encourages middle school students to come up with innovative solutions, 13-year-old Anoshi Eduljee worked with 13 of her fellow students from Langtree Charter Academy to win first place in the North Carolina contest on January 25, 2020. Qualifying for the national round, their team was among the nearly 43 selected from USA to participate in the competition held in Washington DC. Winning the third place, at the awards ceremony at Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington on February 18, they earned $ 2,000 as scholarship sponsored by Shell Oil Company for their school’s STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) program, stated Anoshi’s father Farokh.
Clockwise from top: Anoshi Eduljee; project model for clean water in Cambodia;
winning team from Langtree Charter Academy
Future City competitions encourage students to imagine, research, design and build cities of the future, offering solutions to sustainability issues. "This year’s topic was clean water. Our goal was to pick a country that had many issues with their clean water and to fix the threat to their city’s water supply. We picked Cambodia and designed a resilient system to maintain a reliable supply of clean drinking water,” explained Anoshi. Their model included mixed zones, the hyper loop (proposed mode of passenger and freight transportation), maglev (using the principle of magnetic levitation) trains and the vertical with the key highlight being the "jelly doughnut” that helps prevent pollutants. This "jelly doughnut” that serves as a barrier can rise up to 60 ft to prevent the well from floods and as low as 50 feet during droughts. It should thus control contamination from plot sand, silt, oil and bacteria. The barriers are powered by engines which get energy from solar cell batteries.
Working under the guidance of their educator Jay Hager and mentor Adam Alexander, once the teams were formed in end August 2019, the students would meet up two or three days after school and on Saturday mornings every week. A couple of parents and engineering professionals helped them to plan, design and execute their project. One of the criteria is that they use scrap items and limit their spending to $ 100 to procure required parts. The teams were judged on five deliverables with maximum points, 70 each, assigned to city model and city presentation, 60 points to city essay, 48 to virtual city and 10 to project plan. Anoshi was one of the four students who were assigned the task to plan and build the model. "The main idea is not just to make a model and place it on display but to… get them to know the various steps involved in real-time designing and prototyping…to expose them to think and work like an engineer,” stated Farokh.
Born in North Carolina, Anoshi studies in the eighth grade and her hobbies include listening to rock music and participating in the Lion Dance as part of Kungfu. Farokh is a software consultant with Lowe’s, while Anoshi’s mother Sudha is a software engineer with Wells Fargo Bank, and elder sister Tushna is a sophomore studying computer science at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
Beyniaz Edulji