Home-schooled students share winning city-design project

With a revolutionary purifying system, where each house has its own unit, residents of the fictional city Panacea were able to reduce their water use from 70 gallons per person to three.

"The purified water is safer to drink than bottled water," Sierra Simpkin, 12, explained.

Simpkin teamed with Jamie Poston, 12, and Tim Gaetke, 13, all home-schooled, to win this year's regional Future Cities competition.

The team won an expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the national competition Feb.14-19, where they will be judged on the model of their city as well as an essay and abstract.

The group presented their winning project to students at Virginia City Middle School on Friday afternoon. The objective of the competition is to introduce civil engineering to students, but that's not all they learned.

"We learned how to come to a consensus and to listen to each other's ideas," Gaetke said. "We learned how to treat each other fairly."

The students, part of Nevada Home Schools, Inc., started out with the intent to "just not lose."

"Was it a surprise to win? Oh yeah," said teacher Patti Poston. "It was a great surprise. They did really well."

The theme for this year's competition was "How to reduce, reuse and reclaim water in a single residence."

In addition to conserving water, the team also developed other environmentally friendly technologies, such as an underground magnetic levitation train and a space elevator to move humans and cargo to outer space.

Jamie Poston served as the group's spokeswoman.

"I learned enunciation skills and memorization skills," she said.

The students participate in a variety of extracurricular activities and say they've benefited from being schooled at home.

Gaetke attended public school until he was in the fourth grade, but was removed when his parents didn't think he was being challenged enough by the math and science curriculum.

"You get more of a personalized education," he said. "Where you can excel, you will excel."

"Greensburg" from Silver Stage Middle School won second place, and "Aquatopolis" from Coral Academy of Science earned third-place in the Northern Nevada Regional Competition Jan. 24 at the University of Nevada, Reno.

- Contact reporter Teri Vance at tvance@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1272.