"Les Génies de la construction!" Competition

Imagine a future of smart, sustainable and connected territories

Open to middle and high school students and students of higher education, the 17th edition of the Les Génies de la Construction competition! is launched today.

A true interdisciplinary approach, the Les Génies de la Construction competition! is a great opportunity to promote among young people the richness and diversity of technical and innovative professions in building and public works, as well as their transversality and their ability to adapt to support environmental, technological and digital changes.

Supervised by their teachers, the young competitors are invited to conduct a collaborative and forward-looking reflection, linked to the new challenges of land construction and planning, to imagine a future of intelligent, sustainable and connected regions.

Despite the context of the health crisis linked to Covid-19, 26 academies (171 committed teams and 29 finalist projects) participated in the previous edition of the competition, thanks to the establishment of an exceptional system, in order to allow registered teams to complete their project. Videos presenting the projects were thus produced, in order to allow the juries to evaluate the work remotely and select the winners.

For its 17th edition, the Les Génies de la Construction competition! will adapt again with agility to the still disturbed context, to allow schools to participate and fully invest in their projects.

Be part of the priorities of the Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sports and respond to the challenges of professionals in the construction sector

• Giving meaning and concretizing the lessons, through a transversal and collective work of a team of pupils or students, invited to produce the realization of a construction or a development (physical or virtual model, digital production, etc. .). The presented project is judged on its feasibility and its capacity to be transposed into a concrete and achievable form.
• Include the digital transition in learning, to fully prepare students for a society, for higher education and then for an increasingly digital world of work.
• Contribute to the development of better educational and vocational guidance for young people, in order to better support students in defining their guidance project, which can be a source of concern for them and their families.
• Foster the promotion of the vocational training route as a training route of excellence and success, to meet the new skills needs of companies in the construction sector, in connection with environmental, technological and digital transitions, and to strengthen the attractiveness of vocational training for training in a building and public works profession.
• Place education at the forefront of ecological transition to respond to the will of the Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sports to make schools a field of engagement in favor of sustainable development, biodiversity and the fight against climate change.

Achieve sustainable and civic productions

The productions that the young candidates must achieve as a team must respond to the issues raised by the evolution of an intelligent, sustainable and connected territory, on one of the following themes:

• housing ;
• mobility and travel in the territories (bridge, road, railroad, etc.);
• human activities (culture, industry, education, health, commerce, agriculture, leisure);
• preservation of the environment, including water and waste management;
• local and renewable energies.

Design an eco-district, facilitate the daily life of people with reduced mobility, produce energy with a road, exploit geothermal energy, identify innovations in materials, robotize a task on a site, optimize the solar contribution on a building, ensuring good management of drinking water, managing the risk of flooding, building modular and reversible housing, promoting biodiversity in the city, soft mobility, intelligent management of space, storing and restoring renewable energies ... are all subjects on which pupils and students can debate and work.

The teams fall into four categories:

• "College" for cycle 4 students;
• “Pro” for SEGPA, EREA and 3rd profession prep students;
• "Lycée" for students in the final cycle;
• “Sup” for pupils and students of higher education (STS, IUT, university, engineering school, etc.).

In order to meet and adapt to the expectations of educational programs and the needs of professionals in the construction sector, the rules for participating in the competition have been drawn up by teachers and stakeholders in the construction sector.

Promote team creativity, diversity and interdisciplinarity

The Les Génies de la Construction competition! rewards the collective and collaborative work of a team of pupils or students for a production relating to the realization of a construction or a development (physical or virtual model, digital production, realization of a project…).

Participation in the competition is an opportunity to promote decompartmentalization in general, through:

• cross-disciplinary diversity, by having students from different backgrounds work together;
• interdisciplinarity, by mobilizing knowledge and know-how from several disciplines (general technological);
• vertical diversity, by involving teams from different school or university levels to carry out a project.

Judge a project on its feasibility

The construction project is judged on its feasibility. The achievement can be represented by a virtual model or other digital production and / or materialized by a physical model of the project or of an “intelligent part of the project.

For this 17th edition of the competition, participants in the sup category will have to produce a virtual model, so that the solutions presented take into account the BIM (Building information modeling) approach, accompanied by a physical model of all or part of the project presented.

Open badges to recognize the achievements and skills of young people

The Les Génies de la Construction competition! reiterates in 2020-2021 the open badge edition, initiated last year. These digital images, which provide an accreditation system, make it possible to recognize achievements and skills, formal or informal, acquired during a project. Open participation and personalized badges, depending on the category and the prize won, will be awarded. They will thus allow the young people who will receive them to join the big construction family, by registering them in their passport for the construction "My.constructionpass".

Les Génies de la Construction !, a competition organized in two stages

• An academic selection (if the number of candidate teams justifies it) or an inter-academic selection, which can be organized at a distance, with an oral presentation in front of a jury made up of representatives of the Ministry of National Education, Youth and of Sports, teachers and construction players.
• A national final organized on June 9, 2021 in Paris in “phygital” format, to allow teams of pupils or students selected at the academic level to present their work during a “grand oral” in front of a national jury, or to distance.

The closing date for registrations is January 25, 2021.

Registrations, additional information and regulations available on: https://lesgeniesdelaconstruction.fr