Franklin students take first in engineering competition

Wheaton Warrenville Unit District 200 will send students to a national engineering competition for the second year in a row.

A team of six students from Franklin Middle School will compete in the National Future City Competition in Washington, D.C., starting next week.

Last year, Hubble Middle School students went to the competition after designing a city built on one of Jupiter's moons.

This year, Franklin students used their own time to create a city built in an Australian desert 300 years in the future.

The city is called Qubitersum, which is derived from a unit of measurement in nano terms. The name is relevant because the special challenge of this year's competition was to incorporate nanotechnology into each city.

Nanotechnology is the study of applying science and technology to control matter on a microscopic or molecular scale.

Franklin students incorporated nanotechnology into their city in several ways.

First, all the buildings in Qubitersum are made of glass, which capitalizes on one of the few abundant resources in the desert -- sand. The glass has a nanocoating that is both reflective (to keep it cool) and has the ability to change color depending on weather conditions.

The walls of the buildings also have solar cells so the buildings produce their own electricity. Other sensors monitor the building for conditions such as temperature, which triggers a direct alert to the fire department during a fire.

The city uses a monorail transportation system with similar nanosensors that monitor track and car conditions. Likewise, roads in the city use sensors to monitor traffic conditions that are relayed directly to GPS systems in commuter cars.

It may sound like some pretty advanced thinking, but Franklin students have a history of performing well in Future Cities competitions. At the regional level, Franklin teams placed in the top five the past eight years.

It was no different this year at the Chicago regional competition.

Franklin was one of 17 teams to gather at the University of Illinois at Chicago recently to compare plans and admire one another's visions for the cities of tomorrow.

Each team had three presenters and was guided by both a teacher and an engineering mentor.

Franklin's team of Karen Suarez, Jenny Birman, Cole Manschot, Mariel Tader, Kale Hanavan and Susan Bywaters took first place, earning a trip to the national competition.

"It's a terrific experience for them to be able to share other ideas with the other teams," said Dave Manschot, a packaging engineer who mentored the Franklin team.

"Quite frankly, it all takes a fair amount of work. This is not just a when-you've-got-a-free-minute-go-ahead-and-do-it activity."

The competition tends to attract private and parochial schools in the suburbs, he said, particularly in places such as Wheaton and Naperville, where many parents work in the technology sector. But this year saw more entries from urban schools.

Laura McGovern, a vice president at Chicago engineering firm Alfred Benesch & Co., who has been a final round judge for the past three years, said the competition is about more than building cities.

"Some of the skills you learn in the program don't just apply to engineering, they apply to life," she said, such as teamwork and public speaking.

And, she said, adults have something to learn as well.

"Sometimes you get stuck thinking about how things are instead of how they can be," McGovern said. The students "help us expand our minds and think differently. We look at things like mag cars or hover cars and think, 'that can't happen.' But who knows?"

Franklin students should find out where they place in the national competition sometime Wednesday.

• Medill News Services contributed to this report