At the end of July, the seventh annual Science of Smart Cities (SoSC) program wrapped up at New York University's (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering.

This year's four-week program focused on four broad areas—energy, wireless communication, transportation and urban infrastructure—and involved 65 participants who spent their class time developing cutting-edge smart city technologies and making presentations on their projects at the end of the program. Projects included sensors, internet of things (IoT) concepts, solar energy projects, smart cars technologies, climate-measuring drones, smart bridge technologies and more.

Ben Esner, director of NYU's Center for K–12 STEM Education and program founder, said the participants are not professionals in the field or even college students. Rather, they are sixth, seventh and eighth graders from various middle schools around the New York area.

During the four weeks, students received training and education from a number of NYU engineering undergraduate and graduate students and were then encouraged to use "unconstrained creativity" to come up with their project ideas. Students also received access to microcontrollers, motors, sensors and other electronic components in the department to assist them in designing their projects.

Students also received training from professional actors with a local theatre company, Irondale Ensemble, to help them become comfortable giving their presentations to NYU engineering faculty and students and their own parents at the end of the program.

The program is free to the selected students and is supported by National Grid, Consolidated Edison, Northrop Grumman and The New York Building Foundation.

Each year, students graduating from the program are invited to participate in an advanced version of the program, called the Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the Science of Smart Cities (ieSoSC) program, which builds on the basic program by adding more technical content, such as cloud computing.

The theme of this year's ieSoSC is "Sounds of New York," which will give students the opportunity to work on real-life smart city projects that are focused on creating systems to help reduce urban noise pollution problems.