Future leaders design future cities

Daniela Mohor

Friday, Nov. 2, 2001 | 5:06 a.m.

Sitting in front of a computer in Lyal Burkholder Middle School's library, 13-year-old Brittany Rubalcaba is absorbed by the map of a city on her screen.

"I guess most of our problems come from the university," she tells one of her classmates.

"Are you serious?" he asks, worried.

"We had a lot of riots, so we put a police station over there," she says, pointing at a building with the mouse.

Rubalcaba is one of 16 students at Burkholder Middle School who are participating in this year's Future City Competition.

Created in 1992, Future City is a national program that aims at introducing seventh and eighth graders to the world of engineering.

Under the guidance of a volunteer engineer and an educator -- at Burkholder a librarian helps the students -- participants work in teams of three to design a city of the future.

They first learn how to organize and run a metropolis using SimCity 3000 software, a computer game that allows players to create and control fictional cities.

The teams create a computer-based city, then start working on a scale model of the city and write an essay and abstract about a specific urban topic. This year the competition theme is the use of energy.

Clark County schools joined the program three years ago, and for two years the area has had its own regional competition. Twenty-nine schools are participating this year.

The team that wins the local contest will go to Washington, D.C., for a national competition in February. The top prize is a trip to U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.

The reward, however, is not the reason why schools participate. More than anything, educators see the program as a way to teach children about the world they live in.

"It really teaches about community and what it takes to make a community work," Wendy Fenner, regional program coordinator for the Las Vegas area, said. "This is a great way to demonstrate that (engineering) is not just math and science. It's also about how well you can communicate, how well you can share your ideas with others."

That's a lesson Rubalcaba and her two teammates are learning. She and her classmates had to learn to compromise on issues from who takes the driver's seat at the computer to how to divide the city's budget, she said.

"It's really hard, because different people want different ideas and not all the time these ideas work," she said. "I've learned a lot."

Thanks to the competition, students also learn how challenging running a city can be. The rules of SimCity are such that residents move out of town if the players fail to meet their needs.

To make sure their project is successful, students must balance those needs -- jobs, roads, taxes, parks and more.

"It's just like a real city, where people can go on strike if they're not happy, so you have to make sure that the taxes are up or down to their demand," 13-year-old Daniel Young said, giving the tax policy as one of many examples.

"I don't get how people do this," he added. "This is hard."

Some students find the experience frustrating. To them, SimCity, while a game, is not the fun part. It's a mere stepping stone to building the model.

Although he acknowledges that he learned many things from SimCity, Gerald Newell, for instance, criticized the game for limiting his freedom.

"The computer tells you what you are doing ... It doesn't really let you decide," the seventh grader said.

But Newell won't have to wait too much longer to get to the part he anticipates the most. Students at Burkholder will start building their models next week.

Already, Jackie Welch-Daubek, the librarian and Future City coordinator for the school, is confident that their work will be outstanding.

"This year, one of these groups is going to D.C.,"she said. "I just have confidence about the students. ... They look at the way things are built now and they are more concerned about what's going on with the city. They learned a tremendous amount of skills."

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