Schoolchildren can offer some tips for city planners

Kris Hill

Saturday, Jan. 27, 2001 | 10:04 a.m.

The Future City competition takes place today at the Clark County Government Center. Here's the lineup:

Participating: More than 40 schools from around the state.

Admission: Free.

Schedule: 9 a.m. to noon, preliminary round of judging; noon to 1:15 p.m., lunch, prize raffle and entertainment; 1:15 to 2 p.m., special awards presentation and announcement of finalists; 2 to 3:15 p.m., finals judging; 3:30 to 4 p.m., awards ceremony.

Seventh and eighth graders at Sandy Valley Middle School see buildings taking shape from toilet paper rolls, and they see landfills as a potential power source.

During the past few months nine students from the small community 50 miles southwest of Las Vegas have been collecting everyday items and reusing them to build cities of the future as part of a regional engineering competition taking place today at the County Government Center.

"They look at everything totally differently," Lynn Trell, their math teacher, said.

The Future City competition began in 1993 as an attempt to educate children about engineering before they enter high school so they can make decisions early on about what kind of classes they will need to take to become engineers.

There are three teams with three students each at Sandy Valley and seven of the nine students are girls. Each team has been working day and night since mid-November to create their cities, first as three-dimensional models on computers and then as scale models.

Everything from parts of compact disc players to slushy lids to Styrofoam cups have been used to build the miniature cities on wooden bases. A city model can be no larger than 5 feet long, 2 feet high and 30 inches wide.

For some of the students, translating their designs from the computer to the models was difficult.

"Getting all of our buildings to scale" was the most challenging part of the project, said 12-year-old Sharon Benner. She said she became involved in the competition because she wanted to learn about engineering as a possible career.

Benner and her teammates, Willy Aguirre and Ashlee Hanson, all seventh graders, were as concerned about the environment as much as they were about the engineering details.

They decided to use natural resources as power sources for the city and its vehicles so that the air their citizens breathe won't be polluted, Benner said.

Cars in their city will run on hydrogen separated from water in the fuel cells, and the remaining oxygen will be released back into the atmosphere, Aguirre said.

Aguirre, Benner and Hanson also developed a system that will trap methane gas rising into the air above landfills and convert it into energy that will be used to power the city.

"They did a lot of research to learn about that kind of stuff," Trell said.

Prior to building their model, the team spent two to three weeks researching for the project in preparation not just for building their city, but also for the oral presentation they will have to give during the judging process.

They have continued to practice for the judging process, preparing for any type of question the panel will come up with while evaluating their model and presentation during the competition.

Erik Matelijan, their science teacher, has helped them prepare after guiding one of his teams from last year to a first-place finish in the state competition and a fourth-place finish in the regional event.

Still, the students are nervous.

"They've been having nightmares. They can't eat," Matelijan said.

More than 40 schools from around the state will participate in today's competition in which the cities of the future will be judged on the original computer design, the city model, a short essay and an abstract describing the city and its services, and the verbal presentation of the city.

Preliminary judging will begin at 9 a.m. Kris Hill

is a reporter for the Sun. She can be reached at (702) 259-8810 or at krista@lasvegassun.com.