The first Philadelphia Future City Competition was held at the Franklin Institute in 1996. Every year since then the competion has provided an outstanding experience for hundreds of middle school students. The compeition also injected a vitality into the Philadelphia engineering community that has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. In the words of one of the volunteers "Working with these kids helps me remember why I wanted to become an engineer." Exposing the middle school students to engineering concepts opens up new doorways to learning and provides a motivation for taking the "hard math" and "hard science" courses that many students shy away from.