TECHNOLOGY - Jan. 19, 1994

Building a Better City: If you could design the layout of Los Angeles in the year 2005, what would it look like? After Monday’s 6.6-magnitude earthquake, that question seems rather timely.

About 80 junior high school students got a chance to contemplate a new City of Angels last week in Buena Park during a competition to design the best Future City.

The kids, who came from 27 Southern California schools--including 10 in Orange County--used Sim City Classic software to build their own cities on personal computers used in a contest sponsored in part by Rockwell International Corp.

Sim City Classic, one of the most popular computer game titles in history, allows the user to act as a big-city mayor and simulate the growth of a metropolis from the ground up. It has a scenario for rebuilding San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, but not Los Angeles.

Each team of three students, a teacher and a volunteer engineer had to write essays explaining their creations and their vision for the city of the future. They also created models of their cities and simulated the growth of the cities into the next century with the game software.

A team from Bernardo Yorba Junior High School in Placentia won the regional contest with a design that included ecological areas, levitating trains and plenty of high-rises. The winning team included teacher Todd Ferguson, engineer Ray Fairbanks and students Jeff Carroll, Jacob Smith and Cory Jobst.

They will compete in a national contest during the week of Feb. 23, which is designated as National Engineers Week. The winning team will get a trip to the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.