It takes two girls to carry the city of Tutum-Certa — one on each end. It took seven of them to build it.
The two-by-four-foot model of the fictional city lives at the Ellis School in Shadyside. On first impression, it is cute. It has an orange Hindu temple, a cricket field, square wooden houses the size of dice, marbles representing water reservoirs on building tops, with Great Northern beans as bus pods and an Altoids tin as the base of a hydroponic container farm.
But this little city, with its decentralized modular water treatment system, won the award for most innovative design of infrastructure systems from the American Society of Civil Engineers at the annual Future City competition last month in Washington, D.C.
The competition is held during the National Society of Professional Engineers’ annual Engineers Week to encourage middle school students to learn 21st century skills.
Forty teams, a few from China and Canada included, made it to the 2020 nationals. Some were over-the-top impressive, with big teams, said Karen Compton, Ellis’s middle-school science and Future City teacher.
But the great equalizers were that every team had to justify every decision and prove every assertion it made, and no team could spend more than $100 on parts or supplies.
The teams all had the challenge of identifying an urban water system threat and solving the problem by designing a reliable supply of clean drinking water.
The Ellis team chose to research Barh, a city in northeast India, as its model. Barh’s population is roughly that of Pittsburgh’s. It sits along the Ganges River, which is polluted and floods regularly. Tutum-Certa means safe and sure in Latin.
Five of the girls who signed up for class last fall — Rebekah Rapp, Esmé Warman, Beatrix Prairie, Bianca Aguiar and Maryam Sadullaeva — had no idea what they were getting into.
Charlotte Sauer-Cook and Ella Reed took the class last year as seventh graders and went to regionals. Ellis has gone to nationals by winning six of the 12 regionals it has competed in.
During two semesters of work, the girls got a strong hint of what it takes to be engineers and what Ms. Compton called “a huge life lesson” — chipping away at an overwhelming slog to get results. “They learned to push through.”
When those dreary Saturday mornings in November rolled around, they would arrive at school to work on Tutum-Certa. Many days after school, they worked on Tutum-Certa instead of participating in music, theater or sports. They chose to grind out details for their city, figuring the scale of construction for the model; learning about the use of centrifugal force to remove sludge from water; how to remove pathogens and microplastics from water through ultrafiltration; the bonding properties of ions; the size of storage tanks to scale; building systems to survive earthquakes; how sludge can be recycled, and how to write a 1,500 word essay by committee.
Future City requires that each team be professionally mentored. The Ellis team’s official mentor, Frank Sidari, is an expert in drinking water systems. He works for the international firm Arcadis. John Wojtyna, a retired engineer, has been an unofficial mentor with Ellis teams for the past three years.
Mr. Sidari said he gives instruction, provides articles and other research sources and guides the girls in time management.
One impression he makes on them, he said, is that engineers have to be multidisciplinary.
“It’s not just math and science. Engineers have to be able to write, do public speaking in presenting their models and to use art to do graphics.
“It’s important to mentor students, to engage them early. Not everybody wants to go on to be an engineer, but after they’ve gone through this project, they learn how important engineering is in everyday life.”
A city to live in
Besides eliminating threats to Tutum-Certa’s agriculture and potable water, the girls envisioned a city they said they would want to live in.
“The market is in the center so everyone can come together,” said Charlotte.
“The bus pods are our rapid transit,” Rebekah said, “but this is a walkable city. Nobody here has cars.”
As for the hydroponic container farm, she said, “We had to think about whether it would be a good thing for our city. It’s a big investment. Like, if this was a real-life city, what would we do?”
They established a factory in Tutum-Certa that mass produces the decentralized modular water treatment system it uses.
“It’s our main export,” said Rebekah. “We ship the systems to other cities by barge.”
Bianca, who worked on assembling the solar farm beside the river, said the solar panels are cells harvested from old calculators. She fingered the tiny panels to demonstrate that they move in accordance with the sun.
Bianca is the shy one on the team. She said that taking the class “pushed me out of my comfort zone, and it made us all into great friends.”
“Having good teamwork is why we won,” Rebekah said. “I talked to a friend from another school at regionals, and she said four people on their team of 12 put in most of the work.”
“On our team, everybody did the work,” Maryam said.
“Some ideas were turned down,” Ella said, “but no one took it personally. We got stronger working on problems together.”
At the competition, the judges grilled them, “and there wasn’t a question we couldn’t answer,” Ella said.
“I wish they had asked us more because we were so prepared,” Rebekah said, “and it was fun talking about this project that I put my soul into.”
During the awards ceremony, the Ellis girls joined hands for luck, Ms. Compton said.
“When they announced ‘The Ellis School,’ they jumped up and started cheering,” she said. “The announcers talked about why they chose us, but none of us heard what they said in our excitement.”
One judge’s comments: “You gave a fantastic city overview and I love the name! Using Latin to give it a new name was very fitting since the original "village" was founded in 490 BCE. I love the bio-scanners and bimodal education. You gave fantastic examples that were futuristic but highly plausible. The details that you gave regarding microplastics were very effective and I was glad to see you didn't forget to mention the long term effects. I also love the explanation of electrocoagulation [in] removing plastics from water rather than using chemicals to do that. This sounds like a wonderful city to live in!”
Ms. Compton said she is proud of her girls’ competence and selflessness.
“They know that you have to put the team above you and put the time in,” she said. “I hope, in their future, that when a problem comes up, they will be comfortable saying, ‘Let me look into that.’”
Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626. Twitter@dnelsonjones.
First Published: March 8, 2020, 12:30 p.m.