Engineers Week 2025 ends with annual Design Competition
KINGSVILLE (February 21, 2025) — With Engineers Week 2025 winding down, the Frank H. Dotterweich College of Engineering at 91AV featured a small glimpse of tomorrow’s engineers building tomorrow’s cities as nearly 500 high school and middle school students from 25 regional school districts competed in the annual Design Competition on Friday morning at Kingsville’s J.K. Northway Exposition Center.
This year, students were tasked with designing “The City of the Future” for the year 2100 while incorporating functional assets into the build that would mimic futuristic systems vital in everyday communities.
“The participants need to use their imagination and creativity to come up with the City of the Future,” Dean of the College of Engineering Dr. Heidi Taboada said. “The whole idea for every team is to come up with the transportation of the future and how it’s going to work. They also need to figure out the water energy-nexus, what type of community systems will be used and what type of mobility systems they are going to be designing. That is the challenge presented to them today.”
Several judges from the university would go around and judge each build and selected first-, second- and third-place winners for both high school and middle school with the winning teams receiving a 1,000 scholarship.
Driscoll Middle School’s Green Team of eighth graders Camilla Almaguer, Amara Salazar, Zoey Garza and seventh graders Marcos Garcia and Vincent Hinojosa placed first among the middle schools.
On the high school side, it was Santa Gertrudis Academy's Team 3 made up of juniors Marc Carrales, Noah Bazaldua, Adam Shipman and Jacob Villa who were victorious.
Material for the contest were limited to everyday materials such as tape, cardboard, plastic cups, aluminum foil, small wooden sticks and small pipe cleaners among other items, presenting participants with minor obstacles along the way, though it didn’t deter from the challenge’s good time.
“This experience has been really good; this is my first time doing it and I’m having a ton of fun,” said Lauryn Moreno, a junior from Santa Gertrudis. “We did have trouble getting to the hot glue gun on time and it kept getting cool, so we used duct tape. We made barn grass out of duct tape.”
For teachers, the competition provided an opportunity to see the fruits of their labor as they watched their students navigate their way through the build.
“Giving the students real-world challenges helps them,” said Chris Cavazos, a teacher at Corpus Christi Moody. “As a robotics coach at Moody, we prepare our students for engineering programs and getting them interested in it. This type of environment allows them to apply what we teach them in the classroom. We try to get them to apply everything we taught them, so we want to see them expand on that and use those skills. We want them to use higher level thinking and problem-solving skills.”
Design Competition Winning Teams:
Middle School
- Driscoll Middle School (Green Team)
- Corpus Christi Miller Metro Prep Middle School (Slaytastic)
- London Middle School (City of Eden)
High School
- Santa Gertrudis Academy (Team 3)
- Laredo Lyndon B. Johnson (Design Divas)
- School of Science and Technology (Group 2)
