Slashdot Mirror
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."
Here come the Aquadorks!
must attend high school somewhere. Right?
I think MIT should be sending these kids scholarships right about now if they wanna save any sort of face.
"Talent" is not something exclusive to MIT people.
Before this deteriorates in to a Pro/Anti Immigration flame fest, I cannot but feel awe for these four kids who braced odds to be where they are at now. And to know that the odds piled up against their favor include being alien, poor, living in gang infested streets and yet be capable of this?
For one, I hope the media picks this up, not just Wired. I hope they get as much visibility as they can, on their plight, the lives they live and their achievements. We have all heard and read of ordinary people who surmounted amazing odds to claim their personal victories, but seemingly they happen far less and few in between. What this country need to know is despite poverty, crime and the potential to go wrong, not one, but four kids chose the right, but tough path. And they should be commended for that till kingdom come.
But for what we have seen, the INS would pick them up next week and hand them back to a grateful Mexico.
Rapid Nirvana
Even granting that, it would indicate that said MIT education didn't make them any better. And think, all those student loans for nothing? ;)
Obviously the entire story is somewhat facetious.
"High School Kids Beat MIT..."
I would think the MIT crowd would be used to beatings by now.
I mean seriously, how many marshmellows can these kids shove up their nostrils?
Lets do some real college science. MIT is too busy building the worlds tallest and most complex beer bong. Now THAT'S cool.
Hey, you can't blame MIT for getting intimidated. These kids sound rough. Cape Fear Community College came in third.
I manage a team of 10 to 20 engineers, the number depends on the work load. In the past few years, I have had 5 engineers on my team that graduated from MIT. The MIT's were usually the first engineers to be replaced, I have not been impressed!
These kids are exactly the kind of people we should be encouraging to come to this country; smart, clever, hard-working, creative.
Yet they are here illegally, and something needs to be done about that. If these kids are as smart as the article suggests (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), attaining citizenship shouldn't be particularly taxing.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
RTFA, unless someone with $ steps up to the plate these are not future MIT students. They are currently in manual labor jobs and likely to stay there.
These students come from disadvantaged backgrounds and are unable to get into MIT. Half of them have graduated and they are not getting further education as they cannot afford it.
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!
Yes, I know they are illegal immigrants. But, they are still kids with hopes and dreams.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Often newbies are better than experts. An expert is stuck with the knowledge and experience gathered over time, it is difficult to think outside this box. A newcomer instead can have fresh, unconvential ideas that most experts probably would laugh about but sometimes produce amazing results.
;-)
On the other side, this may just be an excuse for my laziness
Open Source Alternatives
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Really sad. Not that some high school kids can build better robots than the MIT. But that they beat the MIT in the 'Technical Report' category is really sad.
I also find it amusing that the MIT would enter a competition that seems to be targeted towards high schools. Or should I find that sad too?
as we learn more ,we tend to like to complicate things when sometimes a far easier explination or device would suffice. .The simple idea of having onboard power and a lighter tether was a great advantage which threw the game in their favour .
They simplified many of the concepts in the design , to finaly produce a much sleaker robot with a greater performance
The design seems wonderuflly direct and simple , a good example of occam's razor in the eveloution of robots "dont add more than you need
PS:"i apoligise if i missed something TFA is loading at a snails pace for me
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Swean (head of the Navy's Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems program) nodded. He eyed their rudimentary flip chart.
:)
"Why don't you have a PowerPoint display?" he asked.
"PowerPoint is a distraction," Cristian replied. "People use it when they don't know what to say."
"And you know what to say?"
"Yes, sir."
DAMN!!!
Rapid Nirvana
This article from the Washington Post follows-up the story in Wired. In short (and I suppose unsuprisingly), college isn't an option due to their illegal status (no loans, no in-state tuition). Of the two who have graduated high school: One of them is hanging drywall, and the other files papers at a Social Secuirty office.
These kids should be sponsored by O.B.!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
They where the kids that wrote all those reports that you outsourced...
Dick Laurent is dead.
In the standings here are the breakdowns:
Engineering Eval:
Carl Hayden: 53.17
MIT: 44.67
Tech Report:
Carl Hayden: 20.25
MIT: 17
Team Display:
Carl Hayden: 13.5
MIT: 8
Mission Task:
Carl Hayden: 32
MIT: 48
Total:
Carl Hayden: 118.92
MIT: 117.67
MIT lost because they didn't care enough about their display:)
Apparently they were a little too myopic about the task.
As an engineer myself, it figures:)
I also can't help but think what a loss to their original country they are. America has a way of luring the smartest and most hard working people here with the hopes of a better life. And the country where they came from losses one more leader, one more person who could have had an impact.
It is like the USA is the Yankee's of world baseball. We don't have to grow our own talent. We can buy it elsewhere. And then, what do we give back to other countries? We open HUGE factories where we move jobs, like when GM closed the plants in Michigan and moved them to Mexico because people there would work for pennies on the dollar.
What does this say about how the world is being organized?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I don't believe it's offtopic, considering how much attention the article devotes to the topic, to consider for a moment the scale and scope of illegal immigration in the U.S..
If you don't live anywhere near the border, it is probably impossible for you to imagine what has happened over the past two decades in this country. Without any honest debate or policy making, we have entirely, almost formally abdicated the southern border of the United States. Literally millions of "visitors" from other countries now live here. The debate is no longer whether to try to "strengthen the border" but whether or not to give their children driver's licenses and scholarships.
What we have done is create a de-facto second class of U.S. citizen, a "sub citizen" that provides a convenient array of features to business in the southern U.S..
Now the avalanche of "issues:" xenophobia, debates about free trade and freedom of movement, patriotism and racism, classism, corny high-school economic ideologies and horse-and-barn-door-ism. The person writing this article seems to have a clear conclusion, after having spent some time in the midst of the issue: these kids are Americans, and we should treat them like Americans. The thing it makes me think of is that many of our reasoned beliefs (especially those coming from farther up in the chilly north) about what we should do about the "illegal immigration" problem - whether they are principled, right, wrong, or crazy - are often a bit divorced from reality, and most ultimately lead to perpetuation of the status quo: the institutional ghetto, the second-class citizen, and the end of what we love, these days, to lionize as the American Dream.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
I am a US Citizen, severely underemployed, and I cannot afford college either. While I applaud these kids for their efforts, I don't see why illegal aliens can get federal funding to go to college, and I cannot!
Seriously. When I tried to get financial aid, I was awarded $200 in work-study, which doesn't even cover books for half a semester. It is difficult to apply for school, when you can't even pay your rent!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
The radio talk show hosts usually use the term crimaliens when ever talking about illegal aliens. This story puts a face on those "immigrants who are stealing my white child's spot in state college." Personally, I think that smart people should get the most help to succeed. Think about the loss that our economy/society is suffering by having this young man put up dry wall instead of engineering.
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.
As another poster has mentioned, Carl Hayden used to be a magnet program (I believe they were disbanded 5-7 years ago). All of the technology, programming, networking classes were taught at Carl Hayden. I would've loved to go there but Carl Hayden is probably one of the ghettoest around (and I went to a pretty ghetto one myself ... you know with race riots and gang warfare on school grounds).
/rant
This is a great article because it shows that if you pour money into education, no matter what the background of the students, they will excell. Ofcourse when I graduated highschool in the Phoenix Union HS District (same as Carl Hayden), the statistics were against any HS graduates actually graduating from college. (As far as I understood it, out of the 5-10% that went to college, only 1 in 10 would graduate... this was from a long time teacher in the PUHSD) Sure we got scholarships, but very very few of us were prepared for the amount of reading, writing, and studying required for college. There were plenty of people like me that were competent in our respective fields, but could not handle the rest of the classes (the humanities for me).
As the article mentioned, most of the graduates of this school go on to become day laborers or work in a warehouse, and even if they do go to college, their chances of getting a degree are slim to none. I hope the federal and state governments take a tougher stance on school funding and realisticly look at what is needed to make sure every student has the opportunity to succeede.
Almost all of the PUHSD schools focus on getting the bottom more towards the middle then the middle up towards the top. Which leaves us with a weak middle, which in turn creates a less educated middle class.
And came away with the same feeling I had when I read the headline. That is, that it's a great feelgood story, but they didn't really "beat" MIT. They were handed the competition because they scored better in the subjective parts. I KNOW part of that was because they were underprivileged kids who weren't expected to do anything. They essentially rose so far above expectations that they were given the competition as a result.
But it's still a great story.
As an aside, shouldn't someone with some money to throw around help these kids pay for college? As illegals, they aren't eligible for financial aid (nor should they be, but wouldn't this be a great situtation for someone like Mark Cuban?
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
What we have here is an obvious piece of advocacy journalism:
- Over four pages of coverage of an extrordinary accomplishment by four extraordiarily talented and hard-working undocumented immigrant children.
- Most of the fifth page lamenting their financial handicap and plugging a particular federal bill to give MILLIONS of illegal-immigrant children a place at the federal tit and an entitlement to further boost the drain on the taxpayers pocketbooks - with a hefty chunk of the cashflow siphoned off to pay for more beaucrats.
- A copule sentences on how such a program would rip college opportunities out of the hands of other children who are citizens - whose parents are already being taxed - sometimes into poverty - to pay for the institutions and scholarships that would be transferred to the illegals.
Yes it stinks for the kids who built the 'bot - and others like them. But how many similar stories DIDN'T get told about rural-poor US citizen kids who performed similar feats, with similar lack of resources?
It's NOT rare. For starters, if you hang out at NASA for any length of time you'll notice that a LOT of "rocket scientists" are from such backgrounds. Many have such stories to tell. (And in NASA's heyday the educational opporiunities for a kid who was rural, southern, or (horrors!) both were comparable to those of these kids.)
Creating a new entitlement program will redistribute the resources differently but not increase them overall. Further, with the mismanagement and overhead typical of government programs, it's likely to destroy far more opportunities than it creates.
Children who are US citizens are already at a signficant disadvantage to immigrants and student-visa holders. The latter tend to get financial aid as grants - even if they are children of the rich - while the former are left with mostly loans which must be paid off at interest or suplemented by low-paid jobs that take time from study. Tuition has become so astronomical that in many fields the citizens are just dropping out, as the lifetime benefit of the education is exceeded by its unsubsidized cost.
Are we to believe that these four are typical, rather than extrordinary? (There are extrordinary individuals in all large populations.) Are we to believe the children of illegal immigrants are so much MORE competent than the children of citizens that more good than harm will come from from transferring educational opportunites from the latter to the former, dropping a bunch of them through the cracks on the way?
In order to press for a government solution, the story carefully ignores (except to belittle in passing) private sector aid. There are an enormous number of private scholarship programs and private charatable foundations with scholarship programs, with an explosion of criteria for who they will help. (The tax system makes it profitable to create them, and has for decades. And people whos story is like that of these kids who finally make it often create leg-up funds for others like themselves.) They're not well known. But for kids with track records like these there are likely to be hundreds of them that might fund them through school.
IMHO the real tragedy here is that the educational institution (with the gleeful aid of the media) did NOT help these kids dig up private funding. Instead it left them in low-paying jobs and is using their plight to push for legislation to feather its own nest.
Meanwhile, the MIT administration really ought to be busting their butts to dig up scholarship money for these kids. (Especially if they remember what the Model Railroad Club wrought.) Four children of migrant workers who, while still in highschool, beat their team with $800 to buy balloons, tampons, and PVC pipe should be the star recruits for their next freshman class.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I just can't resist this opportunity to say how much I prefer the colleges in my country (Finland) when it comes to money matters. Essentially, universities in Finland are free of tuitions, leaving only the cost of books (which can be bought used or sometimes even found in the library, if you can't afford new ones.) Of course this is one of the reasons why we pay more taxes over here, but since they all go to things like free healthcare and education, I don't really mind. It's like every citizen in Finland was donating a little to help people like those guys get into school (among other things).
:))
:-/
Long story short, the Finnish system gives a chance to everyone who's smart enough to pass the entrance exam. (Oh, and just because our schools are free doesn't mean that they're crap
PS: Just one drawback to my glorious portrayal of my country: if you are an unregistered immigrant you would probably be on a plane back home if you attracted attention like that
Read my blog: HansMast.com
As the cost of an MIT degree continues to spiral above inflation, does MIT continue to attract students that have the "Manus" part?
The article says:
I would argue that Lorenzo's hands-on experience was a key factor in his team's success.
I wonder how many of MIT's students arrive as freshman with hands-on skills? I would guess that this number has been declining over the years.
When I was a freshman at MIT, I remember fixing an old stereo on my desk. One of my eletrical engineering classmates, an absolute math genius, who had already aced the intro eletrical engineering class, asked, "Hey, what are those little things with stripes on them that you've got there?" I said, "You're kidding, right? Those are resistors, you know, "R" in all the problems you've been doing." "Oh", he said, "I'd never seen a real one before."
Mens ET Manus -- Gotta have both to be a world-class engineer. Congratulations to the "La Vida Robot" team for having what it takes!
po'
Come on, man! If you can't afford the o and the r, why are you splurging on an apostrophe?
Think of the children!
Karnal
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.
"You're very comfortable with the metric system," Swean observed.
"I grew up in Mexico, sir," Oscar said.
Swean nodded. He eyed their rudimentary flip chart.
"Why don't you have a PowerPoint display?" he asked.
"PowerPoint is a distraction," Cristian replied. "People use it when they don't know what to say."
"And you know what to say?"
"Yes, sir."
These guys would be a huge asset in any good college because they have more desire to learn this stuff than many students I've seen combined together. I seriously doubt they'd waste their time playing CounterStrike if given the chance at a good Engineering school. Maybe I'll mention their names to my school.
Very interesting story...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
I see the results in the people I deal with in industry. As a generalisation, most of the PhDs I deal with are less productive than their non-PhD collegues because they approach problems as academic problems instead of practical problems. As a result, a lot of effort gets spent investigating stuff that does not matter in the real world, or making impractical assumptions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"MIT's ROV motored smoothly down and quickly located the 5-gallon drum inside the plastic submarine mock-up at the bottom of the pool. But as the robot approached the container, its protruding mechanical arm hit a piece of the submarine frame, blocking it from going farther. They tried a different angle but still couldn't reach the drum. The bot wasn't small enough to slip past the gap in the frame, making their pump system useless. There was nothing they could do - they had to move on to the next assignment."
Thats BAD engineering.
AND
"Engineering Eval:
Carl Hayden: 53.17
MIT: 44.67"
That over 8 points right there.
Don't use that "We lost for subjective reasons " crap here, bucko.
Sounds to me they probably got so much money(11,000), they got carried away with features.
As an engineer, I would say thats a typipical Jr. Engineer mistake.
Of course, that's speculation on my part.
It owuld be truly interesting if the teams wrote a 'lessons learned' paper. I would love to see what the MIT team thinks of their design and the contest in hind-sight.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Totally. I think we should send this story to all those Southern/conservative politicians trying to deny public education and benefits to children of illegal immigrants.