COUNTYWIDE : Youths Win Future City Competition

The year is 2195. The city is Ancona. There is no pollution, no crime, no traffic jams. The futuristic city is efficient, practical and the ideal place in which its creators would want to live.

One of Ancona’s founders, Jeff Carroll, an eighth-grader at Bernardo Yorba Junior High School in Yorba Linda, said his idealistic city “eliminates the problems we have now.”

Carroll and classmates Cory Jobst and Jacob Smith, who spent nearly 100 hours creating their vision of the perfect city of tomorrow, won the top award Saturday in the National Engineers Week Future City competition at the Buena Park Hotel and Convention Center.

The finals in the contest, sponsored by Rockwell International and nationwide engineer societies, took place among seven schools that had earned top scores during preliminary judging on Friday. Seventh- and eighth-grade students from 27 schools in Orange and Los Angeles counties participated.

The three finalists from Bernardo Yorba Junior High School will be going to Washington to participate in the national finals during National Engineers Week, Feb. 20 to 26. The national championship team wins a trip to the U.S. Space Camp in Alabama.

“It’s really an honor. We put in a lot of man-hours into this project,” said Carroll, who is interested in pursuing a career in computer science. “We learned how to cooperate as a group--and it gave us a little window of what the future might hold.”

The nearly 80 students who participated used their wildest imaginations to conjure up their perception of a perfect world. The assignment was to build a complete city with transportation, housing, energy, police and commerce. The various cities had stadiums, retirement homes, seaports, airports, satellites, recycling plants, even an animal reserve for endangered species.

The contest is designed to excite youngsters about math and science, said B.J. May, manager of corporate and community relations for Rockwell International.

“It gets them involved in a hands-on, fun activity that lets them better understand how engineering benefits society,” May said.

Students, in teams of three, envisioned such cities as Utopia, the city of perfection, N.E.P.T.U.N.E.--New Energy producing Prototype for Transportation Unifying the Natural Environment--and Western Lake City, where nature’s beauty still exists in the year 3237.

These places of another time have clean environments, no unemployment, transportation systems that are pollution-free, underwater agricultural systems and energy that is electric or solar.

Vibrant, dull and subdued colors expressed moods of the 3-D scale-model cities, and different materials and textures, including wooden blocks, foam, paper plates and plastic materials, were used to visualize their computer-generated blueprints.

A team of eighth-grade students from South Junior High School in Anaheim was among finalists with their city of Cheven.

Steven Zuniga, Cheryl McClusky and Tom Orosco built their model city with features such as a fusion nuclear power plant--emitting no nuclear waste--earthquake-proof buildings and “magnetic levitation elevated transport tubes that offer rapid, quiet and pollution-free passenger mobility.”

“The future is in our hands,” McClusky said. “If everyone has good ideas toward the environment, then everything will be OK, because the future is what we make of it.”