This month's Wired has the story of four "undocumented" students from Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, who won an undersea robotics competition against teams from a number of universities, including MIT. I read the article last night on the Web, and then discovered the issue of Wired buried in the unopened PyCon mail backlog. The article begins with a picture of the team holding up their robot. The entire story brought to mind the movie Stand and Deliver, which recount Jaime Escalante's successful effort to teach a bunch of poor students A.P. calculus.

I'm not at all sorry that these four beat out my alma mater. Motivation and talent are as important as training, and I've worked with many fine engineers who didn't graduate from any big name schools with any fancy degrees. It stories like theirs, like the PBS televised MIT 2.70 final contest, like the scramble of trying to rescue the Apollo 13 command module, that fired my imagination when I was a boy. I'm glad that these four have had this experience, and hope that something can be worked out so that they can continue their studying and building. I'm going to do my part.