Children tend to be inquisitive in nature, they look at the world differently than adults.
For ambitious students curious about math, science and technology, with technical career aspirations at a young age, a science project involving city planning can help spark an interest in a specific career, or motivate them to continue pursuing future dreams.
For the second consecutive year, McCurdy Charter School participated in the Future City Competition and once again, math students walked away with an award at the regional competition held Jan. 16 at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque.
A team comprised of math students in Grace Gabrentina’s eighth grade class won the Safety Design award for their future home city simulation at the competition, which included sixth to eighth graders in schools from Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
A total of 17 region schools participated, but McCurdy was the only team representing Española and Northern New Mexico.
The Future City Program currently serves more than 40,000 students annually throughout the nation and abroad and is designed to increase student interest and participation about Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) and 21st century skills, according to documentation made public by the program’s organizers. The contest started in 2001 as a nationwide project-based competition and this year, it was redesigned to make use of the engineering design process to aid students in designing more environmentally-friendly cities. This year’s theme, “Waste Not, Want Not,” focused on the environment.
Northern New Mexico Regional Coordinator Janelle Vigil-Maestas said the competition focused on engineering skills this year.
“For this specific regional competition, the students took away an ability to think about the environment,” she said. “They had to research citywide sustainability issues.”
Gabrentina said McCurdy team members put in countless hours after school to work on the planning and conceptualization of their virtual city and three-dimensional city model. The tasks involved in the project ranged from building the bases for a scaled city model, designing a virtual city on the computer and writing an essay detailing the planning and specifications. The students split into groups to establish these tasks, then came together at the regional competition to present their project.
“They worked on it since the last week of October,” Gabrentina said. “The team did very well and were fearless in presenting the city to the 11 judges.”
Christopher Maestas is the team captain. He said he was not nervous presenting the model, which all the students worked on collectively, at the Albuquerque contest.
“I liked it because it was at a museum and we had extra time to explore,” he said.
Maestas said he plans to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology one day. He said he enjoyed being able to work with friends and it was fun making the city model using Sim City software.
“I really like computers and technology,” he said. “It would be really nice to design new computers, or an Xbox, that would be really fun.”
Vigil-Maestas said the software was made available to students as a joint effort from Sandia and Los Alamos National laboratories and the Association of Chinese American Engineers and Scientists.
Maestas said the project was supposed to teach the students how to work together as a team and to help create a model city based on all of their opinions and ideas.
The goal was to have a unique city that’s green and designed with little pollution, where the citizens are happy and safe.
Alain Jayme worked on the essay portion of the contest.
The 1,000-word essay the students were required to write explains how their city is environmentally sound, details some of its unique features and explains how good it’s doing in terms of the stated goals.
Jayme, whose goal is to become an engineer, said the biggest challenge was having the same idea as the team, about how to design the physical model.
He said they achieved their goal of making a city green and to minimize pollution by utilizing solar panels and wind turbines.
He said he was a bit anxious about presenting the project.
“It was my first time doing that,” he said. “I was afraid I could mess up, I was nervous with the panel of judges asking questions about the city.”
He said he helped Maestas type the project essay and work on the virtual city.
Laila Rodriguez said it was fun working on the project with the team.
“It was fun to gain a better understanding of things,” she said. “It also brought us closer as friends, to work on it.”
Some of the features which made McCurdy’s project unique, according to Rodriguez, include the mega towers which featured shopping centers, a landing pad for easy aerial access to the city and an academy to bring together the brightest minds, to make new things and improve on other things.
Beatriz Salazar said she also had fun competing, but was amazed at the other projects, from teams who participated throughout the region.
“It was honestly very intimidating,” she said. “Some of the presentations (from other teams) were amazing.”
Salazar said she wants to pursue a career in chemical engineering because she loves chemistry, science and math.