“Best Use of Automation” Award to budding engineers!

The Twin Cities (Minneapolis–Saint Paul, MN USA) Section of the International Society of Automation (ISA) on 19 January 2013 presented a “Best Use of Automation” award to a Lino Lakes, Minnesota middle school in conjunction with a national engineering competition.

Standing behind their award entry, are LtoR: Neo Canniff, Kennan LeJuene, Evan Nelsen, and Espen Fredrick.

For the second year in a row, the Twin Cities Section of ISA presented the award at a regional event of the Future City Competition, a national, project-based learning experience where students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades imagine, design, and build cities of the future.

The annual Future City Competition is sponsored by the National Engineers Week Foundation, a consortium of professional and technical societies and major US corporations. The foundation is focused on helping to remove social, education and economic barriers that may deter young students from engineering and technology education and careers.

Out of the more than 35,000 students from 1,300 middle schools participating in this year’s competition, regional winners will vie for national awards at the event finals, which will be held 15-20 February 2013--coinciding with National Engineers Week, 17-23 February 2013. Founded in 1951, Engineers Week is among the oldest of America's professional outreach efforts.

“All of us within ISA’s Twin Cities Section are excited to sponsor this award, which we hope will help inspire young students to explore what I believe is the best career field in the world,” commented Peter Baker, CAP, CTech, an instrumentation and automation consultant who spearheaded the Twin Cities Section’s award sponsorship. “We feel strongly that it is our responsibility to help raise awareness among young people of the value and potential of automation and engineering careers. As they say, ‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’”

A four-member team of students from Centennial Middle School in Lino Lakes, located just outside of Minneapolis, received the ISA section’s automation award for incorporating the best and most creative use of instrumentation and automation in its Future City Competition building design project.

To compete for the award, school teams worked with mentors to plan their cities using SimCity™ 4 Deluxe software; researched and wrote solutions to engineering challenges; built tabletop scale models with recycled materials; and presented their ideas for judging.