Patricia @ Nightingal MS: . . . . Thu, Jun 19, 0:36PM PST (-0800 GMT)
We went on a field trip to down town Los Angeles to see how the city is developed and get an idea for our Sim City Project . Our teacher, Mr. Yenovkian, brought us with an engineer to help us understand what we were seeing downtown. This is a photo of all of us.
Wendy Chan@NightingaleMS Yenovkian: . . . . Thu, Jun 19, 2:41PM PST (-0800 GMT)
The Nightingale Future City Competition team took an informational trip downtown, Los Angeles. The team Engineer, Larry Dalton, gave us a tour of the Department of Water and Power where he works.
We took note of the fundamental engineering ideas used to design buildings, bridges and transportation facilities.
We stopped at certain key areas and noticed many things that most people just don’t take into consideration when planning a city.
We looked at architecture. For example, we learned that the fountain pool around the roof of the DWP building had not only aesthetic value, but also served as a cooling system for the building.
We looked at different issues that cities face and thought of solutions to several problems, which we later incorporated in the planning and design of our own future city.
Our advisors also brought in an electrical engineer, a fire chief, and a projects manager to lecture us about things to consider in the design of our city. We used everything we learned in our presentation at the competition at the California Science Center on January 25, 2003.
The Future City Competition is a contest where three team members from each school get together and create their own cities that may some day be a city in the future. Hours of hard work and research were put into our project during after school hours, on weekends and even over Christmas vacation.
There are three stages in the contest. You need to make a blueprint of your city on computer using the SimCity 3000 computer game. First, you need to build a physical model of your city out of recycled materials. And finally, you need to make a presentation of your city. The competition was held at the California Science Center.