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Students from the Edlin School, a private school in Reston, Va., celebrate after winning an international competition to design an age-friendly city. Photo courtesy of DiscoverE

If you could design a city that facilitated aging, what would you include? Students at the Edlin School, a private school in Reston, Va., did just that — and recently won a first-place award for their innovations.

Students Vinay Ayala, Lucas Ribeiro, Nikhita Kuntipuram and Nikhil Kuntipuram recently competed in the 26th Annual Future City Competition.

This contest, open to sixth through eighth graders from all over the world, gives competing students a prompt for a city they are to design, and then requires them to produce a virtual city design, an essay regarding that design, a scale model, a project plan, and a presentation — clearly not tasks intended for the faint hearted.

“I heard about the competition in fifth grade. This is my second year participating,” said Vinay elatedly. “Last year I went to the nationals, but sadly we didn’t get a ranking. So, I thought this year I would do it again with a new team, try to win the competition, and show the world what we can do.”

Based on Richmond, Va.

And show them they did. The students designed and constructed a 3D city model based on this year’s prompt, which was to design an “age-friendly city” that would serve older adults and enable them to stay active.

The students chose to model their city on Richmond, Va., in part because it has “problems with mobility.” They named their model city Halona, a Native American word meaning “of happy fortune.”

The Edlin School team presented Halona in January at a regional competition, and upon making it through that, ascended to finals in February in Washington, D.C. In all, more than 40,000 middle school students from 1,350 schools in 41 U.S. regions, as well as teams from Canada, China, and the Middle East, competed.

Their prize? A whopping $7,500 for their school’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program, and a trip for the students to U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.

A school-year-long effort

The process of designing the city and compiling all of the corresponding project elements took over 10 months to complete. Yet, the students worked tirelessly, believing that the need for a more age-friendly city was, and is, a necessity.

“I noticed that, in the lives of seniors today, for example my grandparents, they have trouble with simple things like getting up the stairs. It may be simple for me, but it’s hard for them,” Vinay said. “We need to accommodate them, so we need elevators and ramps and other ways to make life easier for older people.

“They want to stay active in the community, which makes them happier. We wanted to come up with solutions to prevent them from being isolated, and to bring them back into the lives of other generations to make them happy.”

Getting around the city

The biggest problem the team members had to tackle was the problem of public transportation.

“To solve the mobility problem, we had to come up with two main solutions,” he said. “We came up with a compact community, a new futuristic community that would cater to the needs of people of all ages. And we needed to make every place in the city accessible to people of all ages and abilities, so we came up with the Halona age-friendly transportation system.”

Unfortunately, their solution is not a currently practical one: It relies on not-yet-existing technologies such as flying cars, a stop-and-go mass transit service called the Passover Tram, and the AutoBus, a self-driving vehicle to get from one community to another.

More currently feasible are several programs they envisioned to integrate seniors into the community.

“One of our most important programs is the ‘Adopt a Senior Program.’ This program pairs college students and older adults in a co-housing situation,” Nikhil described.

“The student gets free accommodations, while the senior gets company and services. The student doesn’t have to pay extensive dorm fees, but they can live with the senior and help them out.”

Another program allows people of all ages to grow plants together that they can sell at the local farmer’s market.

“We also have clinics at a walkable distance where minor health problems are treated,” explained Nikhita. She added that another city program could help when, for example, “a person with Alzheimer’s gets lost; someone can track them [using GPS].”

Dreaming big for the future

Allow these ingenuitive students to be your inspiration. You and your grandchild or younger buddy can build your own “future city” together. This would be a great opportunity to work together to create and innovate.

Or you can mentor teens with an interest in your personal areas of expertise and help them to succeed in their endeavors.

If you want to get directly involved with Future City, the organization is always looking for volunteers who support their mission to develop students’ talents in and passion for STEM.

So, what’s next for Vinay, Nikhil, and Nikhita?

“Something that I would be interested in trying in the future is that I would like to present our idea to various engineering organizations, such as going to Richmond and discussing our ideas so that maybe some of them can be implemented in the near future,” Nikhil said.

Meanwhile, Vinay has set his sights on the national science fair that takes place every year in the U.S. “I would take some of the ideas we used in the Future City competition to win over the judges.

“The idea I want to use is one of our [envisioned] energy sources, and do a science fair project on it. Using the results, I can come up with solutions for towns that need help with creating energy.”

Nikhita added, “I would love to volunteer at age-friendly organizations, help elders and keep them company.” She and her brother both agreed that helping out students with upcoming Future City competitions would also be a blast.

Regardless of what they end up doing, these students will inevitably leave their mark on the world. So, if you happen to stop by Richmond in a few years’ time, be sure to look out for some innovative new additions to the city — you might just have the Edlin School Future City winners to thank.

The Future City competition is sponsored by DiscoverE, a network of volunteers that inspires and informs present and future generations to discover engineering. For more information, visit http://www.discovere.org.

Alexis Bentz is a 10th grade student at Thomas Wootton High School in Rockville, Md.