| Lyon Students Design ‘Future Cities’ | |||
| By Vernon Robison Moapa Valley Progress Published January 28, 2009 A group of students from Mack Lyon Middle School participated in the Future Cities competition in Las Vegas on Saturday, January 24. The student teams came away from the competition with high marks for their presentations. Future Cities is a district-wide program where middle-school aged students form teams to design a city of the future. The new cities must consider issues of transportation, education, housing, natural resources, utilities, |
 Mack Lyon students Kaden Simper, Kenna McMurray and Tyson Mortensen explain their future city, Aquascape, to a judge in a trial run-through held Tuesday, January 20. |
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| parks, public works, agriculture and more. The plans are then presented formally to a group of judges to determine the winners of the regional contest.
The local student teams were coached by Lyon technology teacher, Cyndi Brinker and parent volunteer Jacqulyn Pray. The teams began their projects last summer, just before school started. The plans begin on the computer. The students spend two months building their city using the popular Sim City 4 program. Later each team writes an abstract about their city. This is similar to a commercial that sells the benefits and virtues of their concept. Each team also produces a formal essay that explores in depth the many problems faced by the new city and the proposed solutions. Finally each team builds a scale model of their city to present at the contest. |
 Mack Lyon students Danielle Pray, Dejaneara Carter, Jason Zerkle and Viki Karvonen show a model of their subterranean city, Ming Zhi De Shui. |
“These are the kinds of programs where engineers are born,” said Cyndi Brinker. “I have been constantly amazed by this group of kids. Each one seems to soar in a different way.”
The four Mack Lyon teams produced four city concepts. Each community posed its own difficult set of problems and required different solutions. One team, consisting of Danielle Pray, Jason Zerkle, Dejaneara Carter and Viki Kervonen proposed a subterranean city in China called Ming Zhi De Shui. This future city was made up of survivors of a catastrophic World War III |
| and were now required to live underground. The city tapped geothermal energy for its power and water supply.
The second team; consisting of Brodey Blackwell, Colton Pulsipher and Justin Hughes; was a huge floating colony on the ocean. With a desalinization plant to provide water and a unique scheme for using ocean life as a food supply, the city also has the ability to move around on the ocean. “That way it is able to go wherever the resources are,” the students explained. The third city, Wasserstadt, was designed by John Crosland, Landon Willard and Matthew Young. This city is built on the surface of the planet Mars. The city relies on huge Martian ice deposits for a water supply and large solar panels for power. This group also had to come up with a detailed plan for dealing with the muscle atrophy that would result from its residents living for extended periods in zero gravity conditions. The fourth city, Aquascape, was designed by Kenna McMurray, Kaden Simper and Tyson Mortenson. Aquascape is another ocean bound city. But this one sports a huge plexiglass dome allowing the entire city to submerge under the water during bad weather. With nearly 40 teams participating this year, the competition was stiff. Still the local teams fared well. The judges awarded Aquascape with a fifth place overall standing in the competition. Aquascape, Ming Zhi De Shui and Wasserstadt all placed in the top five for best model construction. “I am proud of how (our students) handled themselves,” said volunteer Jacqulyn Pray. “Each of the students from our school worked very hard and they did very well.” |
