Developed through a collaboration between the EQuIPD Grant at the University of Florida and Duke Energy, the Powering the Community (PTC) outreach program has expanded since its inception in 2022 to bring an artificial intelligence and power distribution contest to middle school students throughout the Duke Energy service area. Spun off from the annual Powering the Community: High School AI Design Contest, the Powering the Community: Middle School AI Design Contest was piloted in Spring 2024 and has engaged nearly 100 students in multiple school districts across the central north Florida region.
In response to growing demand for immersive STEM enrichment opportunities that target middle school students, a brand-new summer camp program, Powering the Community: Energy Explorers, is also in motion, piloted last July at Fort King Middle School in Marion County.
The three ongoing thrusts of the Powering the Community program— the middle school contest, summer camp, and the high school contest—share underlying themes while emphasizing distinct aspects of what power is and how it impacts the lived experiences of participating students and their communities.
Synergizing over the course of a single year, Powering the Community now offers students of varying backgrounds and age groups a comprehensive, accessible gateway into foundational AI and energy concepts that help tackle contemporary design problems in power distribution.
Middle School AI Design Contest
The second annual Powering the Community: Middle School AI Design Contest ran from Feb. 7 to April 11, 2025. Still gaining traction, this year’s program hosted 16 students among four design teams from Marion and Sumter counties. The contest concluded with each student team’s submission of a design presentation video, in which they showcased the design process tailored for their home to a panel of judges from Duke Energy.
Over the course of the contest, the competing teams are challenged to design an AI-assisted home energy management system based on real device power data they measured in their homes. Supplementing the community-wide power distribution framework of the high school contest, the power and AI concepts delivered through the middle school contest focused on students’ development of a “mesosystems” perspective, in which they learn how human-level scenarios at the single-home scale can be translated by AI into power usage and energy goals for a community.
POWERING THE COMMUNITY Contest Winners
1st Place – Poor Lonely People from Fort King Middle School of Marion County – Brian Miller, Joseph Sapp, Maryann Intravaia, Victor Dawkins
2nd Place – Raider Creators from South Sumter Middle School of Sumter County – Logan Brown, Ty Jackson, Chanse Mead, Parker Gill
3rd Place – RaiderTech from South Sumter Middle School of Sumter County – Easton Sizemore, Lane Young, James Bradway, Jalyn Nelson
As with the high school contest, each middle school design team was partnered with an undergraduate mentor from UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, who provided ongoing support through virtual communications and meetings.
“Working as an undergraduate mentor allowed me to teach and help students implement the engineering design process,” said Erin Joyner, a UF undergraduate majoring in mechanical engineering. “Through PTC, I can connect with these younger students and impart some of the knowledge I have gained from my general and engineering education experience. I also felt I could support the teachers I worked with on how to advise these students on technical and communication skills.”
The teacher sponsor of each design team takes on an involved and critical role in the middle school contest, offering the necessary class time for students to collaborate in person, and the computer access needed to complete contest objectives.
Energy Explorers Summer Camp
Following its inaugural launch in summer 2024, Powering the Community: Energy Explorers has joined a suite of 2025 EQuIPD summer camp programs offered to middle schools across the state of Florida.
Drawing on the organization’s experience in introducing middle schoolers to technical building blocks of AI design, this latest program was developed under the Powering the Community mission to enrich student comprehension of power distribution principles. The summer camp’s 4-day, in-person structure offered a novel opportunity to expand the scope of this mission, allowing the Energy Explorers program to pivot the Powering the Community experience from a predominantly virtual platform to a series of interactive technical workshop centering on hands-on circuit simulations and builds.
“The PTC program was one of the only engineering-based programs that the students could take during the summer,” said Jacob Kim, a Marion County middle school teacher and 2024 program participant. “Many of these students were exposed to concepts that they would not normally see unless they took a specialized class, like honors ecology and technology, or not until 8th grade physical science.”
Retaining certain elements of both the individual-home perspective of the middle school contest and the community-wide perspective of the high school contest, Energy Explorers empowers students to apply design thinking to different stages of power distribution through computer-based activities. However, students are also able to dig more deeply into the “microsystems” perspective, learning to build physical circuit models that make different principles of power generation and distribution engaging for them to inquire about, test, and visualize.