"I knew everyone (in my class) was going to be mad at me, but I kept it a secret and did it anyway," Dunshee said. "I'd make sure there were problems, like I'd go to the person in charge of power and tell them to turn down the power. I tried to get them off-track. It was fun."

Nik Caligiuri was captain and reported that his crew did well.

"They responded fast most of the time," he said. "We were going to get eaten, but we knocked the aliens out with noxious gas."

He felt like he was able to function well as captain because he's used to pressure, being the pitcher on his baseball team.

Claire Christiansen had the job of negotiating for help from alien starships.

"I called them up, and I convinced them to help us. They were kind of negative at first," she said.

Christiansen has brothers and sisters who have flown into space at the Pleasant Grove space center, so she knew she was in for a good time.

"I really thought I was in space," she said.

"It's fun. I learned stuff. It's very unique with state-of-the-art technology," said Travis Monson, who served as co-captain of the voyage.

Angel investors make it possible to have the state-of-the-art equipment, Glad said. The touch-screen computers are fast, and the graphics are brightly colored. The mood music is dramatic. Everything is shiny and new. The script, which adapts to the individual personalities and groups, is humorous and fun.

For instance, in one exchange the aliens scoff at the ambassadors' passion for humanity, "We know you're human! We can smell you from here!"

In addition, iWorlds can utilize much of what space center officials learned over their 16 years of operation.

"Victor Williamson (the space center founder/director) is on our board. Everything we produce we donate back and vice versa," Glad said.

Williamson said he's thrilled to see iWorlds take the space center concept and fly with it.

"Actually, the story behind it is kinda fun," said Kyle Herring, a flight director at the space center. Herring said Wes Smith's children came to the space center on a field trip and couldn't stop talking about it.

"This is something that's hard to explain. You have to experience it," Glad said. "With the business groups, it's amazing. The weak links show up. It's very diagnostic."

Glad said he can take a group through a simulation, stop and explain to them the problems, then go back and run the simulation with the problems and flaws fixed.

"You know you can tell somebody what to do and they might not get it. This way, you get to feel it. That's why it sticks," he said.

Thirteen-year-old Billie Anne Tucker was one of the first visitors to go on a mission at iWorlds.

"The planet was being sucked into a black hole, and we had to save the people. It was fun. I learned about light, meteors, communication," she said.

"They came home and they talked about it for days. They're starting to write poems about it," said Tucker's mother. "It makes their imaginations grow."

"The decisionmaking process is what impressed me," she added. "It makes the leaders even more so."

---

E-mail: haddoc@desnews.com