High School Kids Beat MIT at Robotics Competition 597
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."
Future MIT students (Score:5, Insightful)
what's the news here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not suprised... (Score:2, Insightful)
Start making them citizens (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
These are not Future MIT students (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The kids' future (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I know they are illegal immigrants. But, they are still kids with hopes and dreams.
Re:Doesn't say much for education (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
It is nearly science fair season... I must dust off my judging clothes :)
experts vs. newcomers (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other side, this may just be an excuse for my laziness
Ockham's(Occam's) Razor (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Start making them citizens (Score:5, Insightful)
It just so happens Americans (and thus, politicians) need to figure out what the policy is going to actually be regarding illegal immigrants. Because at some point, all of the following are true:
1.) they don't generate tax revenue for the services they are receiving... and what they are paid is woefully inadequate by U.S. standards
2.) they are generally capable workers
3.) they are generally putting themselves at great bodily danger to risk later eviction
4.) most states have stopped servicing immigrants.
In spite of the fact that in those same states, the immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won't take.
So we have demand for work that goes undone, supply in the form of willing workers, and ridiculous policies in the middle that reinforce all four points above.
Can you tell I'm in favor of a cross-border working program?
Followup (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:2, Insightful)
Before this deteriorates in to a Pro/Anti Immigration flame fest...
How could that possibly happen? Where do you think all those MIT students come from?
Re:Doesn't say much for education (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't say much for education (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Start making them citizens (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm afraid I have to throw the flag on that.
Those aren't "jobs that Americans won't take". Those are "jobs that companies won't pay Americans to do".
Companies pay illegal immigrants peanuts because they are allowed to; because law enforcement doesn't go after companies that hire illegal immigrants.
If the FBI (or whomever handles these issues now) would actually crack down on companies that exploit illegal immigrants, companies would have no choice but to hire Americans and pay them a fair wage.
It's a shame that our current president's loyalty to both corporations and the Hispanic voting bloc prevent him from honestly trying to solve the problem.
Typical of Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
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:)
Re:Wow! (Score:1, Insightful)
This is the kind of thing that needs to be on CNN.
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:5, Insightful)
At MIT in particular, more than 75% of students receive financial aid, and ALL of it is based on their financial need. Scholarships, in the merit-based sense, do not substantially exist at MIT--or most top schools. The barrier for attending these schools, at least for those who have managed to overcome barriers they have faced before the admissions process, is a merit-based barrier, and not a financial one.
What schools, such as MIT as well as the college I attend, figure is that anyone who has demonstrated that they should be accepted to the institution has demonstrated that they deserve a "scholarship," so the funds go to those who need it most. It's not like at a large state school, where there is a tier of smart kids, and a tier of not-so-smart kids. If you can get into MIT, you're smart, and choosing scholarship recipients based on merit would involve splitting hairs.
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:4, Insightful)
Sucks to be these kids though, their parents probably dragged them along as little kids when they decided to break the law themselves.
The truth... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
"Illegal" Immigration (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Competition scores (Score:1, Insightful)
This is going to be a ridiculous anecdote, however when I was in high school I worked as a pizza boy, making pizzas at a local Mother's Pizza (in St. Thomas, ON).
One of the things that I noticed is that a couple of the stoner employees would check in late and check out early, doing a half-assed job, and eventually they would quit or be fired. It mostly went without comment.
Inexplicably, though, the managers would pick on me for every minor transgression - they'd comment that I put too much green pepper on a pizza, or that my break was during too busy of a period, or whatever. One of the days it really irritated me, so I asked "Why is it that I win the laughable `employee of the month' award virtually every month, yet you're endlessly nitpicking in a way that you don't for other employees?"
The answer stuck with me because it's true throughout life - they held me to a higher standard. While I was doing the same job as others, they saw many of them almost sympathetically, or as lost causes, so they were much more likely to overlook deficiencies or gaps.
Whenever there is subjective rankings, expect the dominant player to be graded much more critically. Expect the underdog to much more liberally have problems and mistakes overlooked.
Re:Doesn't say much for education (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:4, Insightful)
Same goes for illegal immigrants - if they are here because they want to work and do a good job and stay off of the public dole, more power to them and I have no problem with that.
I want to go to college too! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:2, Insightful)
"Study harder next time, dickhead."
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:2, Insightful)
That's fine, just don't do it on my tax dollars.
Re:Doesn't say much for education (Score:3, Insightful)
OTOH I think you can learn things in college. The ultimate goal may be just to have that piece of paper for your resume, but you do have to sit through classes and stuff. It's all what you make of it.
Re:Typical of Engineers (Score:1, Insightful)
Engineering Eval:
Carl Hayden: 53.17
MIT: 44.67
Whatever engineers were judging liked the construction on their sub more than MITs. My first guess would be that it is related to the HUGE budget difference. Given that the high school students built something for about $800, and the MIT students had $11,000 there was an expectation that there should have been something like $10,200 of extra performance, and they apparently didn't have it.
Magnet Programs (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I want to go to college too! (Score:5, Insightful)
What state do you live in? In most states, if you spend two years at an ALMOST FREE Community College, you are granted automatic admission into a 4yr school. Do you have any idea how much Grant/Loan money for higher education goes un-used every year?
I suggest you are not trying hard enough. Getting an education in America is easy, provided you are willing to work your ass off to get it done.
Heard of Google? I suggest you get busy, or stop BS'ing us about how hard it is to pay for College. You are not trying hard enough. If you are in a situation where you cant, or can barely pay your rent, you can probably end up in a Community College FREE OF CHARGE. So, get on it.
Re:Doesn't say much for education (Score:3, Insightful)
I do believe, though, that it comes down to the individual's desire to learn and interest in being successful. I graduated from a small school in Idaho; most of you have probably never heard of it, but it produces excellent computer scientists, electronics engineers, and mathematicians (among other things, but I highly doubt many of
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Could have if they'd wanted. If you didn't want an overlap there, then no problem. I'm just bored with people whining about it and claiming college is worthless. It's worth what you put into it. If you get nothing out, well, that should say something.
Education, learning, and knowledge can't be spoon fed. Just made available.
Re:Stop complaining and do something! (Score:3, Insightful)
[troll]And by doing something you mean giving these four kids money?
That is on par with the logic of starving a hundred thousand iraqui children to death through sanctions and not giving a flying f*ck, while the same happening to one braindead woman causes the whole country to stop.[/troll]
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:4, Insightful)
The United States would be forever improved by accepting immigrants, making them citizens (gotta have those taxes), allowing them to become educated (not the same as just giving them an education; that's a whole other can of worms I do not wish to open) and helping them to become successful in our nation. There will ALWAYS be poorer or uneducated US citizens and immigrants to "provide cheap Wal*Mart labor", for a variety of reasons. You can look at it as a renewable workforce. This way, at least, there will be less competition for AVAILABLE low-end jobs for both groups with the possibility of making your way up the ladder through hard work. Poorer families won't be stuck in a poverty cycle, and can better their situation, or at least the situation for their descendants, and their position will be filled by others when they leave, be it a native citizen who's fallen on hard times, or another immigrant-turned-citizen.
My point is, after that long-winded argument, is that the US will be better improved through aid and human rights than by a self-perpetuating low-income slave class of illegal immigrants.
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:5, Insightful)
How about on theirs, then? It's not like illegal immigrants don't pay sales tax, the primary source of state funding. You know, the state funding that supports state colleges. I'm sure that they likely don't pay federal income tax, but then, many citizens in their tax bracket get more back than they pay in, due to tax credits and such.
Chances are, they pay more taxes than citizens of equal means, without getting nearly as many benefits. Did you mean that you didn't want citizens to go to college on your tax dollars, either?
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:3, Insightful)
An obvious piece of advocacy journalism. (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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.
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:3, Insightful)
Hear hear! God knows our tax dollars shouldn't be used to support the demonstrably smart, hard-working children of illegal immigrants when it can go to people who haven't done anything to merit it besides being born in the right borders.
This is not a flame (Score:2, Insightful)
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
MIT's Motto - Mens et Manus - Mind AND Hands (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:Doesn't say much for education (Score:4, Insightful)
So, I'm honestly not certain what the extra $$$ gets for you, at least in engineering. It's probably somewhat easier to get into good grad schools (which does make all the difference in the world), but even that effect is not especially pronounced. Two people in my graduating class went directly into MIT's PhD program. Probably the main things are networking (both with profs and other students), ego, and atmosphere.
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:1, Insightful)
Just because you fit into an affirmative action profile does not exclude you from being "smart"
Re:what's the news here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those things I tossed out were the first things that came to mind, you will certainly learn more difficult subject matter in any Data Structures and Algos course. And don't underestimate their complexity. A lot of people can't wrap their head around algebra, let alone linking schemes or big-O notation, etc...
You can certainly learn anything you want outside of a college. I hate colleges, in fact. However, as an anecdotal example, a friend of mine is getting his Masters in CS right now and learning Bayesian network algorithms, deep tree searches, efficient methods of traversing graphs (OSPF, basically) etc. When will you have time to screw around with that in the real world, with real hard deadlines?
Also, a lot of what I learned in college is very relevant to programming today. Who cares if I didn't learn how to use "delivery technologies"? That crap is dead simple compared to writing hard code. So your statement, "the kind of computer programming learned at most colleges is *exactly* the sort of thing that is outdated" stuck me as misinformed.
And what I meant by the HR monkies comment is that they seem to care what languages you know vs what concepts you know, when any real programmer should be able to jump from language to language quickly.
your knowledge of accounting is pitiful (Score:1, Insightful)
tax credits don't mean the goverment pays you money. you just get to subract that amount from the taxes you would otherwise have to pay. at best, you don't pay any taxes.
Chances are, they pay more taxes than citizens of equal means, without getting nearly as many benefits.
<sarcasm> yes, given that they earn money in the lowest tax bracket, they definitely spend enough money on purchases to make up for in in sales tax. they pay even more in sales tax than americans earning similar amounts, in spite of not having to pay federal or state income taxes. </sarcasm>
i'm not sure what is worse: your lack of any insight, or slashdot's rating of the post as insightful.
Re:These are not Future MIT students (Score:3, Insightful)
So do poor citizens. Yet I don't hear you complaining about them. Do you honestly think that illegal aliens are illegal because of the tax benefits? That all those people are just trying to avoid filing their 1040EZ?
There are proper channels that an illegal can take to become legal, either with a green card or citizenship.
Yeah, we make it so easy. Just pop on over to the INS on a Thursday afternoon and pledge allegiance to the flag. Ask anyone who has become a US citizen how many years (or decades) it took and how many thousands of dollars it cost them. Then talk to the people who waited years and paid the money and were still turned down. How many illegals do you think applied for citizenship and were turned down or got tired of being told 'Maybe Later'?
Lower the barriers to becoming a citizen and the vast majority of illegals will become citizens. Then you can stop worrying about how much they drive your costs up, as they will be under the same tax law that you are. Or is equality not good enough for them?
Re:They should make a movie out of this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Typical of Engineers (Score:2, Insightful)
I catch your wry humor, but I also note a number of comments elsewhere in the thread along the lines of "if it works, who cares about the display [i.e. documentation]?"
This, I think, cuts right to the problem in a number of areas, including a lot of FOSS projects. If you can't explain what it is you've done, your accomplishments aren't worth much. Sure, I understand the argument that "you can read the source code" if there's no or shoddy documentation (or in the case of physical objects like the robot in the article, "you can mess with it to see how it works", or "open it up and poke around"), but frankly, this is not an acceptable answer for most of us. The simple point is, while I could read the source code of an application or reverse-engineer a robot project, it would be a much more efficient use of my time to read well-written documentation that tells me exactly what I need to know.
Good documentation is an integral part of any complete project. Telling people to "just mess with it" or to "look into the internals to find out how it works" is disingenuous and just plain lazy.