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Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
Allan,
Thanks for the updates.
DE WB9UVJ
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Here is an article from today's Arizona Republic newspaper:
Robotics team finishes second
Karina Bland
The Arizona Republic
Jul. 3, 2006 12:00 AM
For teenagers from Carl Hayden High in Phoenix, their recent second-place finish in a national underwater robotics competition at the Johnson Space Center in Houston was bittersweet.
They beat out both high school and college students from across the country, including the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fell only to the reigning champs from the Marine Institute of Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada.
But, on the heels of their award, they learned that next year's contest will be held in Canada. They won't be going because their coaches won't risk taking students who may be in the country illegally across the border.
Many of the students at Carl Hayden are Hispanic and from poor Phoenix neighborhoods. Schools aren't obligated to ask about residency status or citizenship, and they don't. Federal law requires public schools to admit any child who lives within their attendance area.
Neither Allan Cameron nor Fredi Lajvardi, the teachers who coach Carl Hayden's robotics team, know which students among the 50 or so members are legal residents.
"Our belief is that every kid can join our club and participate," Cameron said. "We're not going to pick and choose based on something our kids don't have any control over, like their birthplace."
Schoolchildren sometimes don't know their true legal status. Many immigrant children were brought here as babies. Some discover their Social Security numbers are bogus when they apply for jobs or financial aid for college.
Not willing to risk that a student could be refused reentry to the United States, Cameron and Lajvardi said, the team won't compete in Canada.
Reason to worry
They have reason to worry.
In 2002, four students from Wilson Charter High in Phoenix were detained at the U.S.-Canadian border on a side trip to Niagara Falls while competing in an international solar-powered boat competition in Buffalo, N.Y.
Their plight raised awareness of children brought into the country illegally by their parents. Smart and articulate, the teenagers were held up as examples for the federal Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM, Act. Floundering in Congress since its introduction in 2003, it would allow college students who entered the country illegally as children to legalize their status.
In 2005, a federal judge threw out the deportation case against the Wilson students on the grounds that they were racially profiled. The students, now in their 20s, are awaiting a government appeal.
The Carl Hayden teachers don't want to see their students in the same predicament. Team captain Annalisa Regalado, 18, said the students are disappointed but understand. It would have been an expensive trip anyway.
Besides, there's talk that Carl Hayden, along with students from Arizona State University and Chandler High, could host their own underwater robotics competition here.
"As long as they get to do something with their hands, build and have fun, they're happy," Regalado said.
Students from across the country compete annually in the underwater robotics competition put on by The National Science Foundation, a nonprofit government agency that promotes science and technology. Student teams must build and pilot robots to complete a series of underwater tasks.
In the summer of 2004, four teenage boys from Carl Hayden won the robotics competition, stunning educators at the event and garnering worldwide media attention. Those students were undocumented immigrants, too. Now they are in college - one at the Scottsdale Culinary Institute - on private scholarships.
Since then, the robotics team at Carl Hayden has grown from a dozen kids to 50. The team continues to win awards, including for their volunteer work to get junior high students interested in engineering and science through mentoring and building robots. Every senior on the team in the past three years, about 25, so far, has gone into the military or college, most on full scholarships.
Now, at competitions, the team is closely watched. Sometimes there are snickers or comments that the team may have just been lucky in prior contests.
But Lajvardi said, "We believe in ourselves," and this latest win cements their reputation as solid and creative engineering students.
Nail-biting competition
For the Marine Advanced Technology Education Remotely Operated Vehicle Championship on June 24, students from Carl Hayden built two robots: a larger one the kids named "Otis" to navigate up and down the 40-foot deep pool, and a smaller one they called "Ipski-Pipski" to conduct a series of underwater tasks.
Halfway through Carl Hayden's mission, the casing that held the electronics on Ipski-Pipski collapsed. The robot couldn't rise to the surface on its own.
Nine of the 16 other teams' robots also were overcome by water pressure and never made it back to the surface in the allotted 30 minutes.
But the Carl Hayden students pulled the robot to the surface, swallowing a five-point penalty, made a quick repair, and sent it back down to finish the mission in 26.8 minutes, the second-fastest time.
"They never gave up and pulled off a successful mission out of a near disaster," Cameron said. "It was really beautiful to see."