What is the Future City Competition?

This nationwide program is part of National Engineers Week. It offers students a fun way to learn about engineering and cities of the future.

Who can participate?

The Las Vegas Regional Competition is open to 7th and 8th grade students enrolled in public or private schools in Nevada. While multiple teams from each school can participate, each school is limited to 2 teams that can participate in the region-wide finals.

What is the competition format?

Groups of 3 students work as a team under the guidance of a teacher and a practicing engineer. Teams design a city using the popular, award-winning SimCity 3000 software. Then, teams build a scale model of a city section and write a 500-word essay on an assigned engineering topic. The competition culminates with a team presentation in front of judges from various engineering disciplines.

What does the teacher do?

The teacher guides the student teams to completion of their projects, but does NOT need to know the SimCity software, does NOT need to have knowledge of engineering, and does not need to know an engineer to participate. Teachers can organize the competition as a classroom activity, a club activity, an “extra-credit” project, an after-school activity or any other format that is convenient. Contact the regional coordinator for more information how the Future City Program meets National and State Teaching Standards.

How do I sign-up?

Fill out the online registration form on the link above before October 20, 2008, select one orientation session and submit the web form. You are ready to get started!

If I have more questions, whom can I contact?

Please contact the Regional Coordinators.

Technical Questions

I'm having difficulty wiht the SimCity 4 on an Intel-based Macintosh Computer?

The SimCity 4 software has not been updated to include the necessary code to run natively on an Intel-based Macintosh computer. You might experience better performance by using an Power-PC based Macintosh, or by using BootCamp and running the game under Windows XP.

How do I run SimCity 3000 on a Windows XP Computer?

The SimCity 3000 packaging indicates that the program runs on Windows 95 or Windows 98, but it will run in Windows 2000 without difficulty. Windows XP users will have to set SimCity 3000 to run in Windows 2000 mode as follows: After installing the program, go to Start, All Programs, Maxis, SimCity 3000. Instead of launching SimCity, right click on the SimCity 3000 icon, select Properties, then select the Compatibility tab and change it to whichever mode works best in your system.

How do I run SimCity 3000 on a Macintosh Computer?

You will need to be able to boot into the older Version 9 of the Mac Operating system. The Sim City 3000 program will not run under Mac OS X. If you have a newer Intel-based Macintosh, you should look into running the Windows version of Sim City under Parallels or Boot Camp.

How can I get additioanl copies of Sim City 3000?

In addition to the copies provided by the Future City competition, additional copies (for the PC only) can be obtained through the National Future City Competition Website.