It all began with a frozen planet named Hoth in the movie The Empire Strikes Back. What a cool place for a human colony! Four seventh-grade boys from Glencoe Central School in Illinois decided to design a city on such a planet. Their city, Seolforis (See-ol-for-ees), won the $5,000 prize in the Future City Competition in Washington, D.C. The contest is held each February during National Engineers Week.
"The biggest challenge was balancing the atmosphere so that the ice wouldn't melt," says Adam Patinkin, 13. The boys decided to build the city near geothermal vents--deep cracks that let heat escape from a planet's hot core. The surface there would be warmest and most livable.
The boys built a model with plastic cups, boxes and Petri dishes. They could not spend more than $100.
Matt Keenan, 12, explains that humans would have come to Seolforis (early English for "silver ice") to mine rich pockets of silver. He planned the mines and a hydroponics system--a way to grow plants with water and nutrients but no soil.
Brian Freedman, 13, was the city planner who made sure Seolforis would have everything its people might need, including education, jobs, recycling, food and lots of fun.
"Where we come from, Glencoe, is a really small town, and there isn't anything to do within 20 miles," says Brian, who built the city model with Dan Dresner. Lucky citizens could watch the Seolforis Miners play baseball on climate-controlled Koufax Field. They could also check out 3-D holographic movies.
Science teacher Barbara Janes and engineer Craig Smith helped the team. But the boys had to nail down tricky scientific details. "If we had it to do over, we would not put the city on an ice planet," says Adam. "It took us so long to figure everything out."