Future City Competition Presentation
by
Charlie Bess
This weekend, I am going to have the opportunity to give a futurist vision for the national awards program of the Future City Competition. This is part of the National Engineers Week activities.
I am used to giving presentations to folks with an information technology perspective. Like most people, I make some assumptions from my own context, while I am creating the presentation.
Since the award recipients are 7th and 8th grade students, I thought I'd bounce my presentation off my 10th grade daughter. She quickly set me straight on what those kids would like to hear about, and what they'd doze through.
I put more nanotechnology application examples and humor into the presentation in the hopes that it is not just the advisers who are paying attention at the end.
As I pulled together the presentation, I was thinking about the amount of change that has taken place since I was in the 7th grade. It all seems natural to me now. Yet, many people view the upcoming changes as overwhelming. Will it seem natural to them 30 years from now? I think it will have to be, otherwise, if the masses can't assimilate it, there would be a social revolt.
I think that whole thought would probably fit into the category of topics my daughter believes the students will doze through ... ;-)
