In the future city of Satoria, the houses will run on fusion and have the technology to make meals, stock the pantry, and make phone calls for the homeowners.

These houses will be the optimum in efficiency and environmentally friendly. Though it may sound unbelievable, Nathan Anderson, Taylor Mueller and Jon Stoff of Queen of Angels School don’t think it is. Not only do these eighth-graders think it’s possible, their ideas won them first place at the Georgia Regional Future City competition held Saturday, Jan. 28.

Eighteen teams from 13 middle schools in the greater Georgia area competed for top honors at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta.

Queen of Angels sent three teams including “Tyco Town” by Brian Simmons and Ashton Woolen and “Urbs Fluminis” by Clayton Hillyard, Eric Murphy and Connor Sabula. The first place Satoria team was mentored by Catherine Anderson, an engineer, and Cynthia Sabula, assistant principal at Queen of Angels.

The team will travel to Washington, D.C. to represent Georgia in the national finals during National Engineers Week, Feb. 18-23. In addition, Tyco Town won special mention for “Most Efficient Use of Energy,” and Satoria won “Best Parks and Recreation” and “Best Verbal Presentation.”

This is the fourth year Queen of Angels has participated in the Regional Future City competitions. The school’s teams came home with second place in 2003, first place in 2004 and third place last year.

Assistant principal and mentor Sabula believes the competition provides educational opportunities on many levels.

“The Future City competition challenges middle school students with exposure to multiple engineering fields, while requiring team work with writing, design, and presentation skills,” she said. “It is a very enriching experience for the student, mentor, and teacher.”

As part of the competition, students were required to create a computer simulation and a physical model to scale, write an essay and give an oral presentation to the panel of judges. The mission of the National Engineers Week Future City competition is to provide a fun and exciting educational engineering program for seventh- and eighth-grade students that combines a stimulating engineering challenge with “hands-on” application. The students must harness mathematics, science, technology, engineering and architecture in the process of designing their project.