July 14, 2005 — I’m still catching up on my magazine reading from being away six months, and this afternoon I skimmed through the April issue of Wired. There’s a story there, the tale of four teenage boys in West Phoenix who had a couple of dedicated high school science teachers. The team took on MIT and other colleges in a competition to build an underwater robot. The kids are labeled the mechanics man, the genius, the leader, and the tether man.

I won’t tell you how the story came out, as you can read La Vida Robot, online. But they did well enough for the account of their ups and downs to be worth a story in a major magazine.

The article talks about the aspirations these teenagers have… to go to college, or a career in the military. But all four of them face formidable obstacles: they are undocumented, aka illegal aliens. All of them came to the US from Mexico as younger children. They are ineligible for scholarships and count as out-of-state if they try to go to a state college or university in Arizona. The story ends with one of the students hanging sheetrock to save up $50,000 to study engineering at Arizona State University.

Well, I went online to see if I could find out more. I was pleased to see that the whole story is there, and even more pleased to see that a scholarship fund has been started. I made a small donation.

I was wondering why this story happened to move me so much. Maybe it’s because when I was in high schoool, I was something of a science whiz kid myself. I competed for and got a summer job programming mainframe computers for the government when I was 16, complete with confidential security clearance. As it turned out, I didn’t stay in hard science but that’s because of choices I made later at Stanford. In other words, I’ve been privileged!

I hope opportunities that suit their talents unfold for these kids.