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High School Kids Beat MIT at Robotics Competition
An anonymous writer submitted a story saying "A bunch of bright high school kids from Carl Hayden Highschool beat out MIT in a Marine Technology Center's Robotics competition.
Here are additional details of the competition."
I went to this very school for their computer program from 1986 to 1990. Must, say, I think this is awesome. At that time, the robotics work was only in "special projects" class, and consisted of a small robotic arm hooked up to an Amiga. They've certainly come a long way.
:P The teacher mentioned in the article Allen Cameron was most definately my favorite as well. Very cool guy. Congrats!
At the time, the school was part of a "Magnet Program," a program designed to desegregate the schools and attract more of us "white boys" to the school. We had labs of true IBMs and Compaq PCs, and had classes available for learning programming like BASIC, Pascal, and towards the end C. They had a "State of the art" 3com ethernet, that to see any changes on the server you had log out and back in again. They even had a VAX/VMS system. Quite advanced for a High School, probably even by todays standards.
They're responsible for keeping me from having to work some boring regular job. Now I get to listen to users all day!
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
RTFA
Thats teacher Allan Cameron, the other bearded guy is also a teacher Fredi Lajvardi.
I was going to go to this high school. It's a dump but there were far more [gang] fights/shootings at the school I ended up going to (North HS), which was literally across the street from the Phoenix Country Club.
Carl Hayden has a nice computer-oriented "magnet" program that attracts a lot of nerds, probably the same that won this competition.
Latewire
From the article (it is good, I suggest you read it) there are links to a scholarship fund for these 4 as well as comments in general on a proposed federal act. These families probably cannot even afford the 3% interest.
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Oscar wipes the white gypsum dust from his face. It's a hot Tuesday afternoon in Phoenix, and he's hanging sheetrock. He graduated from Carl Hayden last spring, and this is the best work he can find. He enjoys walking into the half-built homes and analyzing the engineering. He thinks it'll keep him sharp until he can save up enough money to study engineering at Arizona State University. It will cost him approximately $50,000 as an out-of-state student. That's a lot of sheet-rocking.
Luis also graduated and is filing papers in a Phoenix Social Security Services office. Cristian and Lorenzo are now juniors. Their families can barely support themselves, let alone raise the money to send their kids to college. Last summer, Cristian's hopes flagged even further when his family was forced to spend $3,000 to replace the decrepit air-conditioning unit in their aluminum trailer. Without AC, the trailer turns into a double-wide oven in the desert heat.
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And they're not alone. Approximately 60,000 undocumented students graduate from US high schools every year. One promising solution, according to Cameron and other advocates for immigrant kids, is the Dream Act, federal legislation that would give in-state tuition and temporary resident status to undocumented students who graduate from a US high school after being enrolled in the States for five years or more. The bill, which was introduced in 2003 and is slated to be resubmitted this spring, aims to give undocumented students a reason to stay in school. If they do, the act promises financial assistance for college. In turn, immigrants would pay taxes and be able to contribute their talents to the US.
Some immigration activists don't see it that way. Ira Mehlman, the Los Angeles-based media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, successfully lobbied against the legislation last year. He says it will put citizens and legal immigrants in direct competition for the limited number of seats at state colleges. "What will you say," he asks, "to an American kid who does not get into a state university and whose family cannot afford a private college because that seat and that subsidy have been given to someone who is in the country illegally?"
Read the article, these kids cannot even qualify because they are considered undocumented immigrants.
MIT gives no scholarships.
Actually, the competition has two categories..."Explorer" and "Ranger". Explorer class is almost all colleges and universities, while Ranger is for the high school students. These kids competed in the Explorer class because the teachers assumed they'd lose, so they might as well lose to some good teams...go figure -Jay
There is a link to donate money for these kids to go to college.t ml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/donate.h
Want to make a difference. Click the link give the amount you spent on that iPod, Xbox, PS2, or any even GTA. If evey one that posted a message gave $200 there would be 20,000 dollars already in the account.
Even if you can not pony up the $200 how about 20?
If you think "somebody" should help these guys be somebody.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Since you read the results you should notice that MIT scored a 48 on mission objectives. Thats 15 points more than the winner (32) and 8 points better than the next closest (40 - third place). What this says is that if MIT controlled the space program they would get us to the moon and back, whereas this high school that "beat MIT" in a robotics competition couldn't even get out of the atmosphere. Ok, so the high schoolers actually did the busy work (papers and science fair project back board), this just proves that they are set for the factory work that so many people said they would be doing in previous posts.
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Apparently YOU haven't heard that this only applies to US citizens... since these boys are illegal aliens (what INS calls them!), they wouldn't qualify.
I received a letter from Cornell informing me of this fact when I was applying for undergrad there. It makes sense, since if they didn't have a separate pile for US citizens & foreign students, more than half their intake would be foreign students.
So, they have two standards; one for US citizens, and one for foreign students.
but so is this article - if you're going to report on geek news, something which Slashdot has done well in the past, then you need to report on it _early_ - as in, go to the contest, report that Carl Hayden won over MIT, when it happened. It's not "news" to get this _after_ the Wired magazine is already out in the mail.
I disagree, the guy next to me from Boliva was just naturalized Monday along with a girl from Guatemala who is in the same building. Both had a rather easy process of becoming citizens. How did they do it? They joined the military. Give up 3 years in your favorite branch and you get out with citizenship and a massive college scholarship(40-70k).
I call "watch your step". University Of Washington has said it will not accept Community College transfers for 2 years (2005/2006). I cant remember if it was becuase of costs, competition, overload or what, but the point is, Community College isnt all to great these days if you plan on transfering credits eaisly.