National Engineers' Week Futurecity Competition™

FROM KATRINA TO CHERNOBYL,
FUTURE CITY COMPETITION STUDENTS
ENGINEER SOLUTIONS THAT INSPIRE AND AMAZE

     For most, the recovery from Hurricane Katrina has been a slow, painful journey of grim choices. But, for some young minds, there’s only great potential for wonderful change. “We have a plan to improve New Orleans,” says Melanie Eddington, an eighth-grader at St. Thomas More School in Baton Rouge. “And it could improve New Orleans now.”
     What has inspired a 14-year-old to devise a plan to save the Crescent City is the National Engineers Week Future City CompetitionTM, an engineering challenge where tens of thousands of students nationwide are considering how to revitalize not only New Orleans, but other cities as well.
     Future City, now in its 14th year, asks middle school students to create cities of the future, first on computer and then in large tabletop models. Students, working in teams with a teacher and volunteer engineer mentor, create their cities using the SimCity 3000TM videogame donated by Electronic Arts, Inc. of Redwood City, California. They also write a city abstract and an essay on using engineering to solve an important social need – this year's theme is creating an “Engineering Feasibility Plan” for a specific redevelopment area. At the regional competitions in January, they present and defend their cities before a panel of judges. Future City is held in 33 regions with 30,000 students from more than 1,000 schools participating.
     Future City has long been a favorite among young people who enjoy the challenge of designing and building models of working cities. This year, however, the massive destruction of Katrina has given it a particularly compelling edge, perhaps nowhere more so than at St. Thomas More, where evacuated students from New Orleans enlarged the school’s registration from 800 to 1100 overnight. Teams can locate their city anywhere at any point in the future – on Mars in the year 2500, for example. “But, in tribute to all the new kids who came to our school,” Melanie explains, “we decided to rebuild New Orleans.”
     Tony Arikol, an engineer who volunteers as the team’s mentor, explains, “Most kids had relatives, an aunt or grandmother, who lost everything, where everything got flattened. The stakes are a lot more close to home, a lot more from the heart.”
     Sponsored in part by Engineers Week, a consortium of more than 100 engineering societies and major corporations, Future City is the largest and most successful not-for-profit educational program of its kind. Winning teams from qualifying regional competitions receive an all-expense-paid trip to the Future City National Finals, hosted by Bentley Systems, Incorporated, in Washington, D.C., February 20-22, 2006 during Engineers Week. National grand prize is a trip to U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. Numerous other prizes are awarded at the regionals.
     This year’s Future City essay theme – which essentially asks how to rehabilitate a derelict strip mall – offers an opportunity to explore the staggering challenge of rebuilding an entire city through the microcosm of a five-acre plot.
     “We’ve thought about architecture, history and culture,” says Melanie. “Our city will be modern and hi-tech with the same beautiful architecture so it will be there years from now.” It will also be prepared for emergencies, with plans for four aboveground, mag-lev trains that can rapidly evacuate the entire city.
     A thousand miles north, Jon Pfund, a teacher at St. John’s Lutheran School in Rochester, Michigan, explains that his Future City team, too, is wrestling with the different urban dilemma of neighboring Detroit. Their first step, he says, was a field trip to the heart of that broken city. “It was one of the best trips they’ve ever been on,” says Pfund. “It opened their eyes.”
     “I usually don’t go there,” says Jenna Affholter, an eighth-grader on Pfund’s team, about the metropolis that is less than 30 minutes from her home, yet a world away nonetheless. “I was awestruck. I saw more homeless people than I have in my whole life. There are abandoned malls and buildings everywhere. All the crime and bad things that are happening, it’s sad.”
     Jenna notes that the jolt to her sensibilities, however, only emboldened her to develop solutions. “Our mission was to find out what Detroit really needs,” she says, “and Detroit needs safety. When you have safety, you have more people, then you have businesses that come there because it’s a community.”
     Just like her counterpart in Louisiana, Jenna is also optimistic. “A group of caring people who want to make the world a better place is going to change one city at a time and that can make a whole lot of difference.” Though secretive about the future city her team will present at the regional competition, Jenna asserts, “A lot of our ideas could help Detroit. I hope somebody will take our ideas and turn them into reality.”
     Still another city with catastrophic challenges, Chernobyl, has been adopted by the team from Valley Middle School in Oakland, New Jersey. In the face of deadly radiation that permeates the abandoned Ukraine city as a result of the 1986 nuclear accident there, the team has developed a plan to harness the radiation’s energy to power their city. A system of batteries is then used to move the poisoned atmosphere and concentrate it in one part of town.
     Judie Vihonski, the team’s teacher, admits to being impressed by her students’ attitude. “They figure technology will win out,” she says. “They’re optimistic and they’re willing to tackle anything.”
     Parents are likewise pleased, she says. “They support the kids. They see how much it broadens their horizons.”
     Diving headlong into seemingly intractable problems, the students are immersed in engineering topics that they embrace with gusto. When Brad Lorant, 13, from St. John’s Lutheran is asked what he has learned from Future City, he delivers, rapid-fire. “I’ve learned a ton: nanotechnology, full spectrum solar cells, redeveloping a roadbed, production, industries, redevelopment, contaminated soil – and that’s just the main stuff. There’s also transportation, communication, all that.”
     That enormous panoply of learning is central to Future City’s appeal, say teachers, students and engineers. “There’s science, math, public speaking, civics and history, working as a team and building consensus. And, for most of these students, it’s their very first brush with a profession of which they have very little knowledge,” says Carol Rieg, Future City national director. “Add to that the opportunity to advance real world solutions to real world problems and these young minds soar.”
     Jane Ring, a teacher at Our Lady Help of Christians School in Abington, Pennsylvania, says that in the decade she has worked with Future City – helping to guide several teams to the National Finals – she has been blown away by her students’ foresight. “It’s amazing to me, really amazing, what has happened since we started ten years ago. Back then, my students were proposing cars with hybrid engines and talking about what the Mars explorer would find – and they were right!”
     She adds, “In 1998, my team used the word ‘nanotechnology.’ Now, it’s a real buzzword. Two years ago, the team talked about recovering gas hydrates from the Gulf of Mexico. One engineer judge asked us, ‘How do you know about this? There can’t be more than 500 people in the world who are familiar with this concept.’ Just recently, I’m reading in Discover magazine about recovering hydrates and I thought, ‘We scooped Discover!’”
     She also recalls the future city that earned first place at last year’s National Finals, from that very same St. Thomas More School in Baton Rouge. “They were so on target it was unbelievable.”
     That entry, ironically, called for a floating city off the coast of Louisiana able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, buffer the shoreline, and replenish wetlands. While some public officials have taken refuge in the notion that no one could have possibly foreseen the danger facing New Orleans, some 13-year-olds would likely disagree.

• The following 33 regional sites are participating in the 2006 competition: Albany (NY), Buffalo, Northern California, Chicago, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hampton Roads, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Las Vegas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Northern Nevada, New England, New York City, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, South Carolina, North Texas, Texas-Houston, Washington, D.C., and Washington State. For more information visit www.futurecity.org.
• The winning team (three students, teacher, and engineer mentor) from each qualifying regional Future City Competition receives an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the national finals. National champion team wins a trip to U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, provided by National Finals host Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading engineering software company. Second-place team receives a $2,000 scholarship for the school's technology program, sponsored by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. A $1,000 scholarship for the third-place team's school technology curriculum is provided by The National Society of Professional Engineers. Numerous other prizes are awarded at regional competitions.
  
• The National Engineers Week Future City Competition is sponsored in part by Engineers Week, a consortium of professional and technical societies and major U.S. corporations dedicated to ensuring a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of and interest in engineering and technology careers among young students and by promoting pre-college literacy in math and science. Engineers Week also raises public understanding and appreciation of engineers' contributions to society. Founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers, it is among the oldest of America's professional outreach efforts. Co-chairs for 2006 are the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and Northrop Grumman Corporation. For more information visit www.eweek.org.
  
• Heading the Future City Competition Leadership Council is Bentley Systems, Incorporated (www.bentley.com). The 2006 Future City Essay sponsor is the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (www.ncees.org).
  
• About the SimCityTM Videogame Franchise: Pursuing a lifelong fascination with simulations, legendary game designer Will Wright and his team at MaxisTM studios created the original SimCityTM in 1989. Critically acclaimed, SimCity garnered dozens of awards and sold millions of copies both domestically and internationally. SimCity 2000TM followed in 1993. SimCity 3000, released in 1999, became the #1 selling PC game that year. SimCityTM4 was released in January 2003 and continues to win awards and remain on top of the sales charts. SimCityTM4 Deluxe Edition, which includes SimCity 4 and the latest SimCityTM4 Rush Hour Expansion Pack, launched in September 2003 to rave reviews. These games are rated “E” (Everyone) by the ESRB.
  
• About Electronic Arts: Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), headquartered in Redwood City, California, is the world's leading interactive entertainment software company. Founded in 1982, the company develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video-game systems, personal computers and the Internet. Electronic Arts markets its products under four brand names: EA SPORTSTM, EATM, EA SPORTS BIGTM and POGOTM. In fiscal 2005, EA posted revenues of $3.1 billion and had 31 titles that sold more than one million copies. EA’s homepage and online game site is www.ea.com. More information about EA’s products and full text of press releases can be found at http://info.ea.com. Electronic Arts, EA, EA SPORTS, EA SPORTS BIG, POGO, Maxis, SimCity, SimCity 2000 and SimCity 3000 are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.