Students at Brandywine High School are honing their design and engineering skills in preparation for the district’s first attempt at Chicago Architecture Today’s  2011 Regional Home Design Challenge.

The competition, titled “Mock Firms,” is a student architectural design challenge that gives high school students a chance to show their skills.

“Essentially they’re trying to give kids a real world experience by having them come up with an architecture firm,” said Brandywine teacher Patrick Stier.

Four of Stier’s students — Dakota Jackson, Tyler Smith, Austin Knight and Kelci Lockwood — who take part in his computer-aided design (CAD) courses have developed “Brandywine Architecture” and will represent the school at the competition in May.

The firm will put together and present their design for the “Regional Home Design” category of the competition, developing their own plans for a townhouse structure.

Stier showed the competition to the students and said they were so interested, they immediately chose to submit their proposals for the competition.

“You submit a proposal and out of the proposals, they choose the top ones that they want to see, and you have to turn in three sketches and a two-page typed proposal of exactly what your firm is about,” Stier said. “They’re essentially learning the principles of architecture, as far as the makeup of a townhouse, how many bedrooms you’d need for square-footage, they’d have to calculate all that.”

in addition to learning the principles of design, Stier said students who take the class also learn a wealth of math skills, elements of engineering and modeling.

“When they come and do a CAD program, it’s about 50 percent mechanical and 50 percent architectural,” Stier said.

The students began working on their entry for the competition back in January. Stier said “they will likely be working on it until we leave Friday morning for the competition.”

The students are so excited, he added, they’re even willing to participate in the competition in Chicago despite the fact it is the same weekend as their prom — May 5-7.

“The day of the competition is actually prom,” Stier said. “And they’re going to the competition and if they make it back for prom, they make it back for prom. There’s one not going (to prom) just so they can go to the competition so they’re taking it very seriously.”

Stier said the classes are giving them a chance to embrace possible future careers — and prepare for them as well.

From surface area calculations to spatial relations and scaling, students are given skills that can help them go into the design or engineering fields.

When they do that, Stier said, “they have to have a portfolio, and we try to make that portfolio as full as possible.”