FemGineers, the Heritage Middle School all-female engineering club, competed against 84 teams at the regional Future Cities competition held at Rutgers University on Saturday, Jan. 14. RESULTS: Ariana Kasperski, Brandi Ramcoobeer and Michelle Li were awarded seventh place overall. Joyce He, Rachelle Hu and Sacha Nithikasem were awarded for Best Land Surveying Principals. Lillian Tang and Karen Kim and Lauren Connelly were awarded for Best Transportation System.

Each year the Future City competition challenges middle school students to put their science, technology, engineering and math skills to work by presenting them with an engineering problem to solve. The students must research the problem, devise a solution and build a scale model of their design using recycled materials, which they present at the competition. This year's theme was the power public spaces.

When city planners and engineers develop public spaces they don’t just consider open fields or existing parks and plazas, they look at sites such as abandoned buildings, old railway lines, waterways (rivers, lakes, ponds), former industrial areas, and the single largest land asset in any city—the streets and sidewalks. The challenge posed in the Future City Competition was to include in future cities a distributed network of innovative, multi-use public spaces that serves their city’s diverse population. In our photos, the FemGineers at Heritage are shown putting the finishing touches on their innovative ideas.