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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."
must attend high school somewhere. Right?
"Talent" is not something exclusive to MIT people.
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!
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
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
Read the article, these kids cannot even qualify because they are considered undocumented immigrants.
These kids should be sponsored by O.B.!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Depends on how seriously you took the education.
:-) half the stuff they taught me, I feel like the act of trying to understand it increased my ability to understand a larger range of concepts - kind of like working out to increase muscle capacity.
Although I don't use (and in some cases understand
And the half that I _do_ use turned out be useful at occasionally very unexpected places. So I'm hopeful that I might be able to use some of the other half at some point in my future.
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 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.
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College hardly teaches you anything tangible(unless you major in something really technical). What college does is teach you how to think , solve future problems, and conduct research. All of these things are important for people not to be dumbasses in life.
-Dipster
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.
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