Robots Rule

How immigrant kids from low-income families beat MIT

 by Allan Cameron

As Luis pays out a few more meters of tether, Cristian and Lorenzo manipulate the robotic operating vehicle's (ROV) liquid extraction tube into the toxic stew where it must suck up a witch's brew of dangerous chemicals. The ROV is operating under 3.5 meters of water, and time is running out.

Even if the team can get the toxins on board, they still must maneuver the robot back inside its submarine delivery vehicle—fast. Will the gasket they jury-rigged last night give way, flooding the electronics? The pressure on the vessel's hull is nothing like the pressure on the crew—rookies from the Arizona desert who designed and built the ROV for this one mission.

A new tale from Tom Clancy? No, it's Carl Hayden High School's ROV team competing against the country's top universities for the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center's national ROV title .

Since 2001, several teachers at our inner-city Phoenix public school have created a culture of hands-on engineering that inspires students to exceed their wildest expectations. By building full-sized, pumpkin-throwing trebuchets (catapults), robots, and electric race cars, and entering them in demanding competitions, our students learn what hard fun engineering is.

At the 2004 MATE competition, that gasket held and the Carl Hayden Falcons won the national championship, surpassing MIT and other colleges.

Carl Hayden High is in a poor part of town. Students seldom venture from their neighborhood. Most do not know any adult who graduated from college, except for their teachers. They certainly are not aware of the career opportunities available to them in engineering.

Let me be clear that they are not all diamonds in the rough. Our national champions have a wide range of abilities—which they discover they can put to extraordinary use.

Most kids, by the time they are 13, "know" they are not smart enough to get those great technology jobs. But they are wrong. We have taken kids with D's and F's, and in two years, they are college-track.

Incidentally, half of them are girls.

If we can do this, so can others. If a school has a football team, it should have a robotics team.

Of course, our robotics program doesn't eliminate social inequalities. As reported in Wired magazine, some of the students who beat MIT went on to hang sheetrock, not to engineering school. But some did go to college, which would never have happened otherwise. Most of our kids have exceeded their parents' education by the time they're in 10th grade.

How do we do it? Instead of lectures and textbooks with the answers in the back, we do the real deal. Our kids are like apprentices. They come in saying, "I don't know anything about robotics." But they see other kids working, and soon they're saying, "What are you doing? Can I help?"

We're doing this for our kids and also for our country. Remember when people talked about "Yankee ingenuity"? Americans were on the cutting edge. But today, a majority of the students in our engineering schools are international. As a nation, we are not producing the technical talent required to sustain our standard of living. But at Carl Hayden High, I'm proud to say we are. 

The teachers put in many, many extra hours to make this program go. But we have the pleasure of working with students who are motivated, who want to do more.

...It's the last day of the spring semester and three teachers are working with a dozen students preparing this year's ROV for a June competition. The volunteer team still has to finish waterproofing the electronics case and editing their technical documents. We will postpone vacations until July.

Fredi puts down the soldering iron and says, "Did you see where a California high school competed in the Department of Defense Autonomous Vehicle competition?"

And I'm shaking my head, thinking, "Here we go again…."

Allan Cameron teaches computer science. He can be reached at N7UJJ@cox.net.

photos: Stanley Leary