Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
AKRON - For the first time, a group of Tippecanoe Valley Middle School students will compete in the Indiana Regional Future City Competition at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
The contest for seventh- and eighth-grade students will be from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Walb Student Union.
National Engineers Week Future City competition has students create models of future cities. They must write abstracts about their city and essays on solving social needs with engineering.
June Yazel, adviser for the TVMS team, said members are students who have been identified as high-ability students and are part of Valley's Learning Accelerated Motivation Program. There are approximately 60 students in LAMP, but the students participating in the Future City competition were LAMP students in the creative thinking class. Yazel said when she found out about the competition, she asked them if they wanted to compete and they said they did.
The students meet some during school but put in many hours after school, on weekends and even during their days off school.
The competition is in its 12th year. Teams are judged on oral presentations, computer designs, city models, essays and abstracts.
Yazel said the 11-member team had to design a city of the future. They used the computer game Sim City 3000 to figure out what makes a city work.
The future city has to be set sometime after the year 2150 and the model is just a portion of the city and has to have one moving part. There are size restrictions and a $100 material limit. As a requirement, the team had to have an engineer mentor to help them so Kosciusko County Superintendent and Engineer Rob Ladson is assisting the team.
"We're here to advise," said Yazel of her and Ladson's roles. "It all comes out of (the students') heads."
To build the model city, the team has to use recycled materials.
Eighth grader Robert Bitting said the school building in the model city was built using computer parts that don't work, parts of a hamster cage and a package box. There also are buildings made of light bulbs, bottles, bottle caps and other recyclable items.
Of the hi-tech lab, Biting said "the main purpose is for the disposal of garbage" for the city. It breaks down garbage into their elements and then the city reuses those elements.
The portion of the city also includes government buildings, a hospital, fire station, mall, chocolate factory and "some of the stuff is for aesthetics," said Bitting.
The city's name is Belegost, taken from a J.R.R. Tolkien book. The word is elfish meaning great fortress. It's located in a different galaxy. The city is on an island orbiting a mostly water planet.
The water wheel is the moving piece of the city. Eighth grader Kyle Lowe said they had to line their city with plastic and then covered it with aluminum foil three times to avoid leaks from the water wheel.
Alex Weaver, seventh grader, said the moving wheel is made mostly of duct tape, a hamster wheel and plastic from pop bottles. The wheel was first made with fins, but the fins didn't work well enough so the team made buckets for the wheel, Weaver said. The water wheel runs the "sky lift" and "powers" the city.
The mechanics behind the moving wheel, besides the water, includes a drive shaft, rubber bands and spools.
The water is colored orange, Weaver said, because of a new element found on the planet - ductonium. There also are "metal rods" to help conduct "electricity" for the city, should it be needed.
The city also has its own folktale. Weaver said if the city should run out of power, a giant hamster comes out of a cave and spins the water wheel itself.
"That's our folktale," said Weaver. "But we don't run out of water."
National finals will be Feb. 23-25 in Washington. The national winners earn a trip to U.S. Space Camp, Huntsville, Ala.
