By Stephanie Bunker
Moapa Valley Progress
Since August, students at Mack Lyon Middle School have been innovating a future city in preparation for this year’s Future Cities contest. On Saturday, January 19 four of the local teams gave presentations to the District Judges in Las Vegas at the competition.
In this annual engineering contest, students are expected to complete a series of projects including creating a computer version of a city, writing an essay, creating a brochure, and building a prototype of their future city.
This year’s future cities must be planned at least 150 years in the future and be able to solve the problem of storm water run off. The prototypes were required to be mostly made of recycled items.
The City of Matalasisu Vai created by Lyon students Kaila Enosa, Angel Anderson, Santiogo Carranco, and Mathew Overton, placed in the top 5 out of 30 other teams. It was a city built on a ship. The students imagined it used to be an air-craft carrier but had since been created into a city-ship.
The students solved the storm water run-off problem with rain forest trees that collect water which flows into a waterfall. The main attraction of the ship is the Sea Life Observatory residing underneath the city.
“The judges commented that this group had everything figured out and they could see it being an actual city in the future,” said Future Cities mentor Jacqulyn Pray.
Another Lyon team, Meuxng Na, received the award for “Best Recycled Material.” Logan O’Toole, Victoria Pray, Natania Weatherford, and Mckenzie Turley created this city, a renamed island in Thailand. The group solved water run off by making the roads a permeable membrane made out of a coconut substance that soaks the water into the ground.
Yukta Valley, a future city in Russia over the Yukta river, is a safe haven from all the nuclear warfare which is expected by its designers to be going on throughout the rest of the world. This city specializes in mining gold and silver. They use these metals to make coins for bartering. Because the outside world is contaminated, the city uses hydrogen to take the radiation out of material that comes from outside the protective dome covering the city. Cameron Williams, Dillon Clove, Chris Cook, and Joey Vainisi are the master minds behind the city of Yukta Valley.
William King, Isaah Fairchild, Chet Simmons, and Halen Peterson came up with a city named Calamixen located off the coast of Washington state. This city specializes in giving space tours. In order to keep the smoke from the rockets from lingering over the city, they built a giant fan that blows the smoke over the forest. Because their isn’t enough room within city limits for the space station they made an agreement with the Native Americans to use a corner of their reservation for the space station. The city has equipment to teleport and use hovercraft to travel around.
This was the first year that Mack Lyon teacher Crystal Blackwell taught the Future City class.
“I didn’t realize how much information it takes,” Blackwell said. “The kids have put a lot of hard work into it and had to give up a lot of their own time.”
She hopes that some of the kids might consider becoming an engineer after the experience. Blackwell had read in the Future Cities Handbook that after completing the project many kids feel more comfortable with public speaking, science, and math.
