Southern Nevada Future City 2012 Winners!

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Congratulations to the 2011-2012 Southern Nevada Region Future City Competition winners!

First Place – Triland from Hyde Park Middle School

Our first place team wins a trip to Washington D.C. in February to compete in the national competition.

Second Place – Falcon from Alexander Dawson
Third Place – Concordia from Del Webb Middle School
Fourth Place – Star City from Las Vegas Day School
Fifth Place – Firestone from Mannion Middle School

Other Awards

Best Computer City Design – Concordia from Del Webb Middle School
Best Essay – Triland from Hyde Park Middle School
Best Physical Model – Firestone from Mannion Middle School
Best Presentation – Triland from Hyde Park Middle School

Congratulations to all the participants and we hope to see you back next year.

Upcoming Mentor Webinar – Coaching for Outstanding Presentations

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From the national committee…

Title: Future City Mentors Meeting “Coaching Teams to Deliver  Outstanding Presentations”
When: Wednesday January 11th, 11:00 am EST/10:00 am CST
Invite Sign up & Calendar Details:  http://anyvite.com/khneagehfe
 
*You may also be interested in visiting the Mentors Community Wiki – Presentation Tips for video examples to share with your teams.

18 Days and Counting!

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Less than three weeks remain until the competition.Here is your rundown for the remaining deliverables.

  • Essay & City Narrative turned in digitially through the teacher portal before Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 5PM.
  • Physical model Competition Setup at the NWCTA on Friday, January 20, 2012 starting at 2PM. Checklists for what will be needed on Friday will be provided in the next few weeks so check your email!

Also I restyled the website. Still working on a few things here and there though. If you see any issues with the website, email me!

Exposure to Engineering doubles teens interest

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A study funded by Intel has found that just exposing teenagers to engineering will double their interest in becoming an engineer.

Any facts about engineering, including what engineers actually do and, specifically, how much money they earn, motivate more than half of teens to say they are more likely to consider engineering as a career. Programs such as robotics and science competitions offer teens the real-world, hands-on experience with engineering that improves the likelihood that they will get hooked on the subject and pursue it in college.

 

Future City Mentor Virtual Workshop – Physical Model

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The National Future City Competition is having another mentor seminar, this time covering building the physical model. It takes place Thursday, December 1 from 10-11A PT. More details here.

This web meeting will cover the mentors guide to helping your Future City Competition (http://www.futurecity.org) team build an outstanding and visually striking physical model of their future city. The session will be lead by guest speaker Karen Armfield, P.E., Associate Vice President of AECOM Transportation and Future City Regional Coordinator, with Bentley System’s Be Mentors Community Leader, Martin Pflanz, P.E. as moderator.
To find out more about the Be Mentors program, go to www.bentley.com/BeMentors

At the start of the meeting click here

Suggesting testing your system 15 min prior HERE

SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition on sale for $5

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Update: The sale ended early, it is now over.

Attention teachers and students – right now you can get a digital copy of SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition for Windows from STEAM for only $5. This is the same version of the software we use in the competition. You will need to create an account with STEAM and a credit card, debit card or PayPal to purchase the software online. Purchase soon as the sale wont last long. You will need to have an active internet connection to download and install the game, as well as when you want to play the game (no internet connection, no playing the game). This digital copy of the game will last forever (or as long as “forever” is on the internet).

The sale ends November 18 at 9PM PT. 

Be aware that you can only run one copy of the game at a time – if you log in to your STEAM account at one computer it will log you out of any other computers that are logged in. If you want to buy multiple copies of the game you will need multiple email accounts.

If you want to make multiple email accounts, may I suggest Google’s GMail service? Create a single account, like firstname.lastname@gmail.com, and then use “plus addressing” to turn it into multiple accounts – e.g. firstname.lastname+1@gmail.com, firstname.lastname+2@gmail.com, etc will all go to your inbox but count as multiple email addresses.

Submitting SimCity Virtual Benchmark Form

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Submitting your SimCity Virtual Benchmark Form is the 2nd part of submitting your students’ SimCity work.

Here are the steps to submit the form…

  1. Log into the Teacher Portal on the regional Future City website.
  2. Scroll down to the “Teams” area.
  3. If you have not already created teams for your school, enter the students’ team name (same as the SimCity region name), and the students names, including the alternate. Click the “Create” button.
  4. After you hit the Create button, the team list will include that team. If you need to edit a team’s information or remove them from the competition, click the blue Edit link for that team.
  5. Below the “Create Team” area, there will appear a new team list for Submittals.
  6. Click the link to fill out the SimCity Virtual Benchmark Form.
  7. Fill out the form based on the questions and the SimCity file. Click the Save button to submit the form.
  8. For each team you have in the competition, repeat steps 3-7.
In January you will return to the teacher portal to submit the Essay and City Narrative portions of the competition.

New SimCity Upload System for 2012!

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Attention teachers! There is a new method for uploading and submitting your SimCity 4 regions to the Southern Nevada Future City Competition for the 2011-2012 competition year. The instructions are available in these two PDF files…

Update 11/9 – Internet Explorer does not work with the KickSend website. You will need to use Firefox (PC) or Safari (Mac)

Preparing Your Upload

Upload Your Region with KickSend 

This year we will be using a website called KickSend.com. This is a much easier way to send your SimCity 4 region file to the committee. Be sure to read both sets of instructions completely before uploading the region file to the committee.

There are two components to the SimCity submittal process

  • SimCity Virtual Benchmark Form – submitted through the teacher portal on this website (instructions here)
  • SimCity 4 region file – submitted through Kicksend using the 2nd set of instructions linked above
You may begin submitting your Virtual Benchmark Forms and uploading your SimCity region files beginning immediately, and they must be received by November 30, 2011 at 5PM local time.