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Mack Lyon Students Design Future Cities

Mack Lyon Future City Team Yotsu Gokuraku won the Most Innovative Moving Part award at this year’s competition for the city’s unique mass transit system. Team members pictured l to r Garrett O’Toole, Mack Nelson, Bruno Reyes

By Misti McDonald

Moapa Valley Progress

Mack Lyon Middle School sent four teams of four students to the National Engineers Week Future City Competition in Las Vegas on Saturday, January 22. Lyon teacher Cyndi Brinker and Future City team mentor, Jacqulyn Pray, spent countless after school hours guiding, mentoring and assisting these 16 kids with their research, resume writing and the final model creation.

The mission of the competition is to provide a fun and exciting educational engineering program for seventh and eighth grade students. The program combines an engineering challenge with a “hands-on” application to present the students’ vision of a city in the future.

The winners at the Vegas competition are eligible to travel to Washington D.C. in February for the Nationals competition.

This years group of competitors was larger than last years including schools from Northern Nevada and parts of southern California.

“This years competition was pretty stiff because it included a school from Northern Nevada who last year made it to the Nationals Competition in D.C.,” said Pray.

This year’s theme dealt with public health. The teams were required to come up with some sort of research or solution to a current medical issue that the human population in their city faced.

Mack Lyon sent four teams to the Future Cities competition in Las Vegas.

The four teams spent months writing essays to describe a future city and the technologies that it would employ. The teams then had the challenge of building a small-scale model of the described city which had to have at least one moving part.

“This moving part is the crux of many of the models because it has it’s own judging category called “Most Innovative Moving Part”, awarded by the Northwest Career and Technical Academy,” said Pray. “The students really work hard to make it shine, it’s the most enjoyable thing they get to work on!”

This years Most Innovative Moving Part award went to Mack Lyon Middle School Team Yotsu Gokuraku, a futuristic floating city based in Korea, with a medical focus on the treatment and prevention of radiation.

“The kids were so excited to win it! Every kid wants to win this one!” Pray said.

The moving part was called “The Tube”, a futuristic transportation system.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority recognized Mack Lyon Middle School Team Luna Opolis for the Best Sustainable Water System. Luna Opolis expressed a way to sustain water for a population of 50,000 people.

Luna Opolis’ is located at the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon where it is believed that a significant amount of frozen water is located. This team’s medical focus was on people with physical injuries which prevent them primarily from walking. They used the former actor and spine injury victim, Christopher Reeves as their example. The team proposed that with the lack of gravity on the moon people like Reeves would more easily be able to walk.

The other two teams were Tulum which is a futuristic city in Mexico. The students prided themselves for being environmentalists and they chose Lupus as their medical research topic.

The fourth team was Bendar Besar which is an underwater city off the coast of the Bermuda islands. Their research focus was cancer with hopes to use kinetic water as a treatment.

“It was really nice to see the camaraderie that the kids showed to one another,” Pray said. “There was no fighting to be the best, just a lot of helping one another out!”

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