Students engineer futuristic cities

People live in plastic cups.

Roads are made from erasers.

Fields are green shag carpet.

Welcome to Michio City, a master-planned community of 81,328 people in 2171.

It's one of five miniature cities Challenger Middle School students will take to Saturday's regional National Engineers Week Future City Competition in Denver.

"This will be sprinkled with coffee grounds to make it look more realistic," said Michio City founding father Greg Espenlaub, 14, using a glue gun to pave the rubber streets.

Five teams of three students each from Challenger will compete against students from about 20 other Colorado schools, with the winning crew advancing to next month's nationals in Washington, D.C.

Future City competitions draw about 30,000 seventhand eighth- grade students nationwide from 1,000 schools. They compete in 35 regional contests.

The students used "SimCity 3000" software to design a hands-on city, juggling issues such as crime, pollution and taxes. Each team could spend $100 on materials but had the use of unlimited recyclables.

Espenlaub and co-creators Amanda Kesting and Meghan Smith spent only $10 on supplies, such as pencils to support an above-ground gondola transit system made of toothpicks, plastic wrap and old Legos. Sibling toy boxes were raided for zoo animals. The enterprising eighth-graders even dug through trash.

The Challenger teams worked on their projects after school and at lunch, said Carl Howard, coordinator of the school's talented and gifted program.

"Local engineers mentored the teams," he said. "The highlight was watching the kids develop ideas and having the engineers put some reality to it."

But fantasy also was plentiful in the city designs.

Inspiration, a city of skyscrapers and parks set in 2213, is the brainchild of eighthers Andrew Condas, Andy Brunner and Joseph Zhang.

"It's almost like New York City," Zhang said, "but only good, with no crime and no pollution."

Inspiration is home to more than a million highly educated citizens who have better things to do than talk on cell phones and send e-mails. Instead, messages are sent via microchips implanted in citizens' brains at birth.

The mode of travel is magnetic levitation.

"Magnet roads propel hydrogen-powered cars into the air. These are voice-activated vehicles that are pollutionfree," Zhang said. "You just say, 'Car, go to Wal'"

Transportation was key to the planners of Michio City.

"People in the future will probably be lazy," Kesting said. "Inside the homes is a rotating black hole transportation system that has two horizons that merge together and stop the gravitational pull.

"(They) allow commuting to the singularity, which will allow you to go into different dimensions in other places and actually transport to a different space."

In other words, Michio City in 2171 won't have Colorado Springs' traffic headaches of 2005.

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