Al-Hadi School Student Team Wins Regional Future City Competition
Last updated: Feb 01, 2009

HOUSTON: A team of students from Al-Hadi School of Accelerated Learning have won the Texas-Houston Regional National Engineers Week Future City competition. They will now travel to Washington DC to compete in the 17th Annual Future City National Finals, scheduled for February 17- 18 at the Hyatt Regency, Capitol Hill.

The winning students, Yasmine Sanaci, Amirpooya Dardashti and Ali Ahmed, teamed up with their teacher, Niloufer Momin and their volunteer engineer mentor Mansour Shirvani, Project Engineer of MBM Engineering and Inspection Services. The competition took place at San Jacinto College central campus in Pasadena on Saturday January 24.

The competition involved students to create cities on computers using the SimCity 4 Deluxe software, provided by Electronic Arts, and then build three-dimensional, tabletop models to scale. To ensure a level playing field, models use recycled materials and cost no more than $100 to build. Students present and defend their designs at the competition before a panel of engineer judges who test the depth of the teams’ knowledge.

Students also write a 300-500 word abstract and a 500-700 word essay describing their city. This year’s topic is “Creating a Self Sufficient System within the Home Which Conserves, Recycles and Reuses Existing Water Sources.” This year’s judges in Texas- Houston region included over 24 engineers from local Engineering Firms and professional societies. “Future City” developed by the winning team was named L’ile Verte which means “Green” in French. L’ile Verte is created to provide renewable resources such as organic solar cells, tidal energy and wind power and Biofuels with Nuclear energy from the radioactive element Thorium Atomic 90 instead of Uranium 92 as back up power.

It is located in Eastern Australia bordering the Pacific Ocean at the foot of the Great Dividing Range with a river flowing from it. More than 30,000 students from 1,100 middle schools in 39 regions across the country participated in the Future City regional competitions. The grand prize is a trip to Space Camp in Alabama, provided by National Finals host Bentley Systems, Inc., the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for the infrastructure that sustains our world. L’ile Verte provides very nice recreations for tourists and the residents of the city. Beach hotels surrounding the border of the ocean provide great scenery for the tourists.

The city also provides theaters, playhouses, and much more for the teens. For great sport fans the city provides a football, and soccer stadium. The mountains provide hiking trails, which lead to open grass areas, for families to enjoy. L’ile Verte also comes with high education, and very good universities, resulting in L’ile Verte students with very excellent and high IQ’s. The medical facility is the best seen, with very easy transportation leading to and from the facilities with a Neurology, Cardiology, and Orthopedics Department providing some of the most recent diagnostics. L’ile Verte houses all include smoke detectors that have phones, which call the fire station as soon as the possibility of fire is detected.

“It was a great experience working as a team”, said Ali Ahmed, “ It provided sharing of our ideas and selecting the best”. Yasmine and Amir thought it provided a great learning process specially about the city planning and infrastructure.

“Working with the mentor gave us key technical information needed to design the city infrastructure”, said Yasmine. “It is wonderful to have so many professionals willing to help the young kids learn and benefit from their experience and support the program as mentors:” said Dr Taqvi, Regional Coordinator, “ but we can use more mentors for this expanding competition in future”.

Region runners up included - Duchesne Academy’s Escolara Team in second place,third place - Lutheran South’s Elf City II Team and fourth place school-Paul Revere’s City of the Future For those wishing to compete in next year’s competition, please contact Dr Zafar Taqvi, Texas- Houston Regional Coordinator at 281-244-4436 or at email Z.Taqvi@IEEE.org.