Michael A. Smith `93 Leads Third STEM Team to International Championship

Hello Wooster Family and Dr. K.

I wanted to share with you that my Future City Middle School team won the World Championship in Washington DC in February. We now have won back-to-back international titles and the third time in five years. My team is now the winningest team in the history of this prestigious STEM competition.

I have coached our Future City team over the last 17 years. We have won the regional competition 12 times and been nationally ranked 1st (three times), 2nd, 4th, 6th, 11th (twice), 12th and 13th over those years.

This year’s team created the future city of Odesa Ukraine and then presented their project to the diplomats at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC (see attached Lancaster newspaper article).

While the competition is heavily dominated by engineering schools and science academies, we (a public school) are now on top of the ranks. I attribute a good deal of my teams’ success to the liberal arts education I received at Wooster. I remember the dean addressing us with our parents at freshman orientation. He said that Wooster will teach us not what to think but how to think. My dad (also a Wooster grad) cried at that moment. I was a Philosophy major and Economics minor at Wooster. While I have never had an engineering class in my life, I learned how to think, how to compete, and how to win an engineering competition.

You can learn about the competition at https://futurecity.org/.

Also see the FC Press Release

Posted in on March 10, 2023.