National Engineers Week Future City Competition™

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Tips & Resources

Consult with your school’s IT department early in the process to work through any issues that may arise when installing the SimCity software. Note: SimCity does not require a licensing agreement. To download a digital copy of SimCity 4 Deluxe follow these instructions:Download Directions .To install the MAC software please follow the directions that come with the software.

Encourage students to explore the toolbar, learn what each button does, and share their discoveries with each other. This is important as time will speed up in a simulation and decisions must be made rapidly during the game.

The Terrain Toolbar gives your team considerable latitude to create a terrain that will support their city. They can make rivers and coastlines; raise and lower the terrain; create trees, forests, and streams; raise or lower the sea level; and stretch the terrain. When they have finished building the terrain, they can press the “accept this terrain” button to enter the new City and then use the vertical and horizontal tool bars.

Give students several sessions to get comfortable with SimCity before they start designing in earnest. (If possible let a few students take SimCity home and have them really explore the game.)

The Mayor Mode Toolbar helps the team make the kind of decisions engineers and city planners make. Where will they put houses, commercial zones, and industries? What kind of roads will they build? How will they power the City? Use the icons on the left vertical navigation bar to place and alter City objects.

Mayor Mode Icon Overview

Landscape icon allows you to create trees, water and level surfaces.
Zone icon let’s you create residential, commercial, and industrial zones.
Transportation icon creates roads, highways, subways, rail, and more.
Utilities icon build your water, power, and recycling facilities.
Civic icon develop your police, fire, schools, hospitals, recreation areas, landmarks, special buildings, and more.
Emergency icon allows the dispatch of fire, and police; the location of a disaster; and the start of a disaster.
Advisor panel icon and city opinion polls icon let’s you learn about the issues affecting your city and to read the bottom scrolling screen for headlines and articles.
Budget icon and graphs icon look at your budget, ordinances, neighbor deals, graphic and citywide data.
Options icon find the preferences, saving the City, selecting a new City, or exiting here.
Data views icon (on the bottom horizontal bar) creates views of your City based on specific criteria.
My Sims Mode view the Sims opinions on issues affecting their lives.

The SimCity simulation allows students to watch, experience, and draw conclusions about the complex relationships and dynamics of citizens’ needs, growth, taxation, revenues, and sustainability. Before they build their Future City, have students run several SimCity simulations. Use these questions to move them from concrete experience to abstract conceptualization and active experimentation:

As the City begins to grow, use the graph window to provide projections about City size, traffic, power usage, unemployment, number of residents, commerce, industry, pollution, crime, health, and education. Ask: What can you do to educate more of your citizens, reduce pollution, improve crime statistics, etc. Test various ideas as they continue to run the simulation.
Use the Data Views tool to see the mix of industries in the City and compare that mix with national demand. Ask: What tax rate would encourage sustainable growth?
Designing a SimCity is a balancing act between income and expenses. Ask: Do you know what it costs to build things? And what produces revenue? Play with various options. Building a successful city means not building more than you can afford.

As students continue to run various simulations ask:

What features attract people to the city?
What attracts industry to the city?
What are the pollution levels? Can they identify the cause?
Where did you place your hospitals and schools? Are they in the right location?
What is the growth rate in your city? Can you identify what is contributing to a rapid or slow growth rate?

Remember that SimCity is not a one-time build. Students can easily restart; just make sure to keep a copy of the “clean” basic city. Let students re-do the city as many times as they want—this allows them to explore the interactions and learn intuitively.

Keep ethics in mind. Cheat codes or shortcuts are not allowed and will result in point deductions.