Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Back to the future

WEEKEND EDITION

Oct. 1, 2005

Middle Schools that want to sign up for this year's Future City Competition can contact regional coordinator Janelle Boelter at (702) 258-3194 or e-mail her at [email protected]. She says the organization also is seeking volunteer engineers to serve as engineering mentors for the teams.

For more information about the Future City Competition, visit futurecity.org.

Middle School students from throughout the Las Vegas Valley are gearing up for the National Engineers Week Future City Competition regional, with the winner going to the national championship next February in Washington, D.C.

Last year's Southern Nevada regional champions, the private Las Vegas Day School, returns all three members from last year's squad. They say they -- or any other eventual winner -- will have to have tremendous imagination to capture the title for the best concept of a future American city.

"Last year, we created a city where silicon computer chips were built into the roads to direct the vehicles, but we lost (in the nationals) to a team that created a broccoli-powered city," said Josh Valenzuela-Puerner, 13, a Las Vegas resident of eight years.

"It was great to get the experience as seventh graders, but now that we are in the eighth grade we are going to have to do even better."

This year, the 30,000 competitors from more than 1,000 U.S. middle schools are being given a special task to address what to do with abandoned strip malls in their cities.

Each team nationwide works under the guidance of a teacher and a volunteer engineering mentor. The teams use their computer skills as well as math, science and engineering techniques. Each project includes a computerized concept of the city, a scale model of a portion of the city and an essay.

The deadline for entry is Oct. 15, with the regional finals slated for Jan. 28 at Sierra Vista High School. The national finals will be Feb. 20-22 during National Engineers Week.

The national champions get a trip to the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.

Las Vegas Future City Regional Coordinator Janelle Boelter said each year about a quarter of the 103 local private, public and charter middle schools enter the contest. With two weeks to go, she hopes to add significantly to the 23 schools she had signed up as of late last week.

"Last year, we had 25 schools and 30-35 teams from those schools," Boelter said. "We'd like to get a lot more because this is a great learning experience for the students.

"We especially want to reach out to the new schools and the new teachers there to make the Future City Competition a tradition at their schools."

In the eight years Las Vegas has competed in the 14-year-old event, Las Vegas Day School had done no better than fifth place in the regionals before last year.

That squad, which also featured Jordan Lamothe and William Sidell, both 13, has inspired fellow students. As a result, the school plans to enter several teams this year.

"It would be great to win the national title this year and have our names permanently put on the walls of the school," Jordan said.

"The challenge is not only to build a city but also deal with redevelopment. When things get bad, places go out of business, people move out and land values go down. This year, we need to be more creative and we need to have more variety" in the entry.

Sidell, who was born and raised in Las Vegas, said the help his team received last week from their engineering mentor Grant Tokumi of G.C. Wallace "helped us learn what we need to do."

Still, Sidell and his teammates believe the strip mall challenge will be tougher for the Las Vegas teams because Las Vegas is much newer than other cities where there are many more abandoned strip malls than in Southern Nevada.

The local entries, however, will have their own special features inspired by Las Vegas' tourism- and gaming-based industry that they expect will impress the judges.

"What we will have that is different in our future city is casinos," Sidell said, noting that their entry in last year's nationals was the only one with a gaming district. "It is expected that the Las Vegas team has casinos in its future city."

Cynthia Ochoa, the teacher in charge of the Las Vegas Day School teams, says that while she "brainstorms" with the children, they make the ultimate decisions on what their future city will look like.

"I stimulate their thinking but I don't dictate their direction," she said. "I just hope the kids learn something and have some fun doing it.

"When we won last year, it was just awesome. The kids were just walking on air."

Neil Daseler, director of the Las Vegas Day School at 3275 Red Rock St. near Jones Boulevard and West Desert Inn Road, said he feels that the students participating in the contest learn skills that can be used for a lifetime.

"I was impressed not only that they won, but also (by) their full understanding of what went into building their future city," said Daseler, whose school has 775 students enrolled from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

"We are seeing children who may be the future engineers of our valley."

And while the defending champs already have begun working on their latest entry, Boelter said there is plenty of time for teams that are considering entering and creating a winning project by late January.

The students first create their cities on computers using SimCity software that is donated to each participating school by Electronic Arts. Then they build scale models -- the Las Vegas Day model last year was one inch equaling 100 feet -- and write the essay.

At the competition, the students present and defend their designs before a panel of engineering experts who serve as judges.

This year's challenge forces students to examine five-acre rectangular lots filled with boarded-up storefronts and turn them into a mixed use development of retail and residential units.

Future City National Director Carol Rieg said the contest is not meant to be easy.

"Future City purposely gives middle school students challenges big enough to cause even the experts to scratch their heads," said Rieg, who has been a part of the competition since it began in 1992.

"It gets them to think about a problem many of them see every day on their way to school or home. They identify the role of engineering in a context they can relate to."

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