Summer Camp for City Building

Jackie Snow reports on the proceedings at the Science of Smart Cities (SoSC) program at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Center for K-12 STEM Education.

On a recent August afternoon in Brooklyn, dozens of summer camp students swarmed around cities of their own creation. Sure, they were mostly built out of Legos, small sensors and cardboard, but they were thoughtfully laid out with carefully designed infrastructure. One such city was Meracia, a name that is less exotic than first appearance.

Meracia (America with the words scrambled) was built by Elizabeth, a 12-year-old. "Elizabeth explained that Meracia was built in the shape of a hexagon so everything can be equally distributed," explains Snow. "The solar panels were built with sensors and motors that can actually move to get more sun, and three main Wi-Fi towers triangulated around the city’s downtown hub with smaller towers to fill out the rest of the city."

The article includes a lot more detail on the agenda and goals of the SoSC program, which is the first of its kind in the country but has already attracted at least one imitator.