So me and a few other latino engineers from Stanford are volunteering at the Third Street Community Center as mentors for teams made of 5th-8th graders. These teams are going to build some sort of contraption to rescue a survivor trapped on a bridge post-earthquake (see pic below) for the San Jose Tech Challenge 2012. As mentors, we’re going to guide them with their design process.

Today was the introductory meeting at the San Jose Tech Museum and they showed this to our group along with about 100 other kids and adults. A bunch of the other kids were taking pictures of the rig and checking blueprints (that they clearly did not make) on their iPads or other devices. It struck me that a bunch of these children were probably trying to win this competition to gain name recognition with the help of their well educated parents and $$$. As we were walking back to the community center all our kids could talk about were their ideas for building these unique mechanisms that they would use to rescue the small doll on the bridge. Talk went from magnets to suction cups to extending ladders to motorized wheels and drawbridges and even I got excited. 

Our kids may not have the resources that the others have, but their imagination is limitless. These kids are going to be future leaders in their fields and I’d be happy to get up at 8AM every Saturday morning to guide them in this challenge. They inspire me.