Pinnacle Academy

WASHINGTON — Solar panel roofs, wind-powered community centers, cork brick homes and cable trains made from Lego pieces are scattered around Yeshilist, a city created from the imaginations and research of four seventh grade students.

The Pinnacle Academy students presented Yeshilist to a panel of judges on Jan. 23 and won the Washington-area Future City Competition, allowing them to compete in the national finals next week.

 “We didn’t expect that much,” said Hatice Evci, the team’s teacher adviser. “We were expecting third place or something like that, but never first place.”

 Each year during National Engineers Week, Future City holds a competition in which seventh and eighth graders complete a four-part project that allows them to create their own sustainable communities.

 The four different requirements of the competition are a virtual city created using the game SimCity 4, a research paper, a 3D city model, and a live question-answer session in front of competition judges.

 The goal for this year’s competition was to have students build an affordable community for those who lost their homes in a disaster or financial problems.

 The Pinnacle Academy students didn’t have much trouble finding inspiration for their community. They’re concept came from the heart.

 “We thought the most common natural disaster around the world is earthquakes. And we thought about the earthquake in Istanbul that happened in 1999,” said Selin Altintas, who is of Turkish descent along with the rest of the team.

 “Forty thousand lost their homes and were in very severe conditions.”

 Selin said her team’s project stands out because it is useful and practical.

 “It’s really realistic, the whole refuge after an earthquake concept. It’s applicable to life, yet in a futuristic format,” she said.

 Students and Evci said the entire school came together to support and root for their favorite team.

 “All our teachers helped us improve our ideas. Our English teacher checked our essay and they all helped a lot,” said participant Zehra Yilmaz.

 “It’s one of the first things the school’s won, other than Science Olympiad, so it came as a shock to everybody.”

 But it was a good “shock,” and now other students are looking up to the young engineers as role models.

 “I have two younger kids that I’m carpooling and they now kind of admire my daughter because they got first place in a really prestigious competition,” said Ismihan Yilmaz, Zehra’s mother.

 “Now they are kind of treated differently at school, so (younger students) want to be like her. I’m sure they’re going to try to join these kinds of clubs next year.”

 As the students prepare to compete against 48 other teams from across the nation, parents are thinking about what they will tell their kids if they don’t come home with a trophy.

 “I’ll tell her that it’s the participation and contribution that counts,” Yilmaz said. “They gained lots of experience just by following through a project up to the end and that…should mean a lot to them.”

 And even if the students don’t win, they still appreciate the new ideas and concepts they have learned since working on the project.

 “We came across things that we never really thought about before, like engineering concepts that are in our normal neighborhoods,” said Zehra. “So we got to think about those and see how engineers design the neighborhoods that we actually live in.”