Team Jasmine, Layla, and Bianca (Cedar Cliff H.S., Cumberland County) - Honorable Mention, West Youth

Judges' statement

This team’s map, launched from a starter template through a DTL mapathon, looked good, had good metrics, and did good outreach – a good result! The team focused on compactness, as it was very important to them that “counties got represented by people around them who would understand them, and value their problems.” 

Endorsements: 2

Personal statement

We chose the compactness map because it was very important to us that counties got represented by people around them who would understand them, and value their problems. For our map, we made sure that we were inside the population range; we tried to get an equal population for each district, to make it fair for the people running for office.

Compactness is another component we looked for while creating our districts. We tried to keep our districts' compactness above 35%. We wanted to make sure that each district had counties within the same areas as them. The contiguity of our districts was very important and we had zero districts in different areas.

We wanted to make sure that a county was not just put with another where their values would not be respected and represented.

We tried to make the best possible map with the tools and knowledge that we were given within one day. This was the first-ever map that we made and we believe that we did well but want to try to be even better by making a second attempt at a map.