After spending extra hours at school every day for the last several months channeling their inner-engineers to craft their own little cities of the future, more than 1,200 elementary and middle school students got to show off the fruits of their labor Tuesday.

Teams from 60 schools gathered at the Rock Financial Showplace in Novi to present their handcrafted city models based on a theme of nanotechnology at the annual Michigan Regional Future City Competition sponsored by the Engineering Society of Detroit.

Ann Devori, a teacher at Dearborn Heights Montessori Center, supervised a group competing at the event for the first time that included several Arab American students.

She said they used scientific concepts that they learned along with their imaginations to create an efficient city based on what they thought the planet would be like 100 years from now.

“It’s pretty realistic,” she said about the strange looking city of asymmetrical structures.The model makes use of a tennis ball, CDs and other simple items.

The students’ design is complete with transportation and water purification systems, with a solar power apparatus built above the entire city.

Devori and the students said because it was the school’s first time building a model and competing.  They weren’t shooting for any particular award, but they came home with three.Awards for Best Rookie Team, Best Use of Green Principles, and Most Use of Alternative or Renewable Fuels were all presented to Dearborn Heights Montessori.

“They’re flying high,” Devori said. “It was fun, but some days were difficult,” she said about the months of work the group put in.

She said the project introduced the students to a new kind of learning experience that they weren’t used to.

“It’s another exposure for them,” she said. “They’re exposed to art and music every day, but they’ve never been exposed to the discipline of the engineering thing.”Devori said that most of the students don’t necessary plan on being engineers when they grow up, but at least one does.

Eighth grader Alison Jawad, 13, said she does plan on a career in engineering, and not just because her Arab American parents want her to.”I’m really into it,” she said. “I’m very into math science.”

Jawad plans on attending the Dearborn Center for Math, Science and Technology, a special Dearborn Public Schools program for high achieving math and science students, when she starts high school next year.But she said the major lesson that she and her classmates took away from future city project had more to do with teamwork than science.”We have to cooperate. It teaches us to work with other people,” she said.Devori said that it was an engineer parent of one of the students who brought the competition, which wasn’t highly attended by Dearborn-Dearborn Heights-area schools, to her attention.

She decided to fire up the kids up and give it a shot.

Seventh grader Mimi Fadel, 13, said she learned that “Just because it’s your first year, it doesn’t mean you won’t get any awards or recognition.”

She said the team plans to start working on a new city model in the summer, with the success of their first year serving as motivation for next year’s competition, and as momentum for the rest of their education.

“It will definitely give us some inspiration,” she said.

The overall competition’s first place award went to Royal Oak Middle School, which will move on to the national finals in Washington, D.C., in February.