Thursday, March 31, 2005

Underwater Robots, an inspiring tale

The April WIRED has a great article, "La Vida Robot," about a group of poor Latino high school students who enter an underwater robotics competition. (via Boing Boing)

"La Vida Robot" is a fantastic story. A bunch of "illiterate people from the desert" took on corporate-sponsored teams from elite universities, and they "proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country."

"La Vida Robot" is also a sweet piece of feature writing. It's well-paced and suspenseful (improvised repairs!). All four of the kids have roles in the team. There's excellent use of detail (thermometers; raindrops; "'This is good, this is good,' Oscar kept repeating, .... 'Did you see how hard it hit the wall?'").

"La Vida Robot" lacks one thing——a real-life happy ending. Because of their undocumented status, these kids can't get college scholarships or student loans. Donate to their scholarship fund: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/donate.html.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home