David Hack, Freelance Writer

Harding students win Future City

By David G. Hack

Suppose someone encouraged you to dream about what life could be like in the future. Then they allowed you to choose a team to work with and provided you with time to plan how to make that dream come true. Suppose you were given resources, expert guidance and a national forum for presenting your plan. Sound like a fantasy?

For three eighth grade students from Harding Middle School, it’s a fantasy come true. As a result of the Iowa Regional Future City Competition held January 24 at Prairie Middle School, Cedar Rapids, Sara Bergen, Madison Fontana and Katy Huebsch will be traveling to Washington, D.C., February 22 – 28, to present their vision of a future city, “Fantasia,” in the national finals.

“The greatest benefit for the students who participate is that they get to learn valuable life skills that hopefully will help them be successful in whatever career path they choose,” said Ron Griffith, City of Cedar Rapids Traffic Engineering Department. As regional coordinator of the competition, Griffith added, “the competition requires the students to learn computer skills, budgeting, planning, design, researching, public speaking, technical writing and teamwork to complete their project and the best thing is that they get to learn these skills while having fun.”

For Bergen, Fontana and Huebsch, their “fun” began last August as they learned what the Future City Competition involved. Since then more than 100 hours have been invested doing research, writing, preparing a presentation and building a model of their city. This has been a major undertaking for students busy with athletics and performing arts as well as a full schedule of class work.

“It’s been a really cool experience. We learned about the different areas of engineering” said Huebsch. “We learned how important teamwork is,” added Fontana. “And we learned a lot about each other,” echoed Bergen. “We didn’t know how much work was involved in engineering.”

To prepare for the competition, the team had to develop a future city using SimCity 3000TM Software, write a 300 to 500 word essay, write a 100 to 200 word abstract, build a scale model of a portion of their city and prepare a five to seven minute presentation. This year’s essay topic was “How can plastics be used to help senior citizens in the future?” During the actual competition, the team had four rounds of preliminary judging after which they were ranked in the top five. A final presentation was made before a team of 11 judges who asked pointed questions of them.

“Fantasia” won in a very competitive finish. This floating city is approximately the size of an aircraft carrier and moves its population toward or away from the equator to regulate its climate. Virtually self-contained, this city accommodates all of its citizens, but especially its senior populations.

National Engineers Week, The Gazette, February 22, 2004