Sunday, February 28, 2010

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen..

Sometime ago, I had the opportunity of training 5 kids for the FLL robotics competition, along with two other colleagues (What's FLL?).

Since it’s a robotics competition, competing kids/ teams need a flair for computer programming, concepts of motors, gears, sensors etc. And it needs loads of creativity to evolve approaches and design a robot to accomplish the mission.

Given this skill set, teams are typically formed with kids in their 6th, 7th or 8th standards, and who have exposure to computers (usually have computers at home and probably play a Nintendo or an Xbox). The competition also requires them to be fluent and confident articulators. Therefore, it’s not unexpected that the contest is usually between kids from schools of the upper echelon.

However, we decided that we will not go the road oft travelled – we wanted to give this exposure to young students who wouldn't otherwise have access to such things as computers, robotics and programming. So we formed our team with five young students from class 6 and 7, from a Government school, located in a small village-like locality behind our office campus.

The school caters to the nearby community of, mostly, daily wage labourers working in the huge and multitude constructions happening around. Some of them work as cleaners and other such jobs in my office.

The school was not badly maintained. The teachers intended well. But yes, they had limitations to what they could wish and aspire for their children.

The kids chosen for our team did not have exposure to computers or programming. This, we had somehow expected. Since the school was a Kannada-medium school, they couldn’t speak much English as well. This was a problem, as two of us, including me cannot go beyond ‘Kannada gothuilla’. Nevertheless, we decided to give this a try.


We devised a three-fold curriculum to train the kids on basics of computers, basic English and presentation skills and of course, the robotics programming.

Amid several disruptions to our coaching (due to personal and official reasons), we ploughed ahead, slowly, but definitely not steadily.

The kids became quite familiar with computers (we used to watch other FLL videos in Youtube. And that became their favourite website!). They became adept in making ‘speeches’ – very often surprising us with little snippets that added that extra zing and acumen to their presentations. They had also lots of presence of mind to include changes that we suggested, very naturally in their presentations.

By the time it was time for the India finals, we were confident that we will put up a very decent performance.

But the competition day turned out to be even greater an experience. The kids sizzled with their performance. They zipped through the team work evaluation, technical presentation, as well as the project presentation. In each of these rounds, they were well received by the judges, who were impressed by the kids’ brilliance. Our robot too, in spite of some initial hiccups with the light sensor, ultimately accomplished all the tasks for which it had been designed.

We realized that our team was on par with many other contesting teams. Our team also became a favourite with the crowd.


We were informed that we are one of the top contenders for the top four awards. Despite strong competition from other teams, the sentiment was so loud and positive that we were very hopeful that we will walk away with at least one of the awards.

But we didn’t win any. We felt disappointed, especially for the kids, who were very hopeful that they would win. They were hoping to travel by flights and see more of the World.

But I was happy and content for several reasons.

The kids now understood computers, programming and robotics. They could understand simple English conversations and reply back. They had broken several boundaries and set a higher aspiration for their school.

Recently, we had been to their school and the reception we got made us feel very humble. We were treated like celebrities – the entire school was assembled, we were felicitated and every child in the school wanted to shake hands with us.

More than that, we three coaches had matured by a huge measure.

Several times during our coaching, we were limited by our own ‘admission to reality’ that we had been extremely idealistic in selecting kids from such a background. Often we had to fight off our own disbelief that we will not get anywhere.

And what helped us in fighting this attitude, was the kids’ intelligence, energy and enthusiasm. They were as bright and enthusiastic as we wanted them to be, grasping new knowledge, as they say in Tamil, as camphor catches fire. (During the India finals, they were quite impressed with another team singing Queen’s ‘We will rock you’. They wanted to learn that song and sing like them. So they did!)

And they were never apologetic or coy about their economic conditions. They were aware of their background but never carried it with them. They had higher aspirations and wanted much from life. This, I’m sure, will take them higher.

I hope and pray that they stay and grow like this, and get all the right opportunities and never have to ‘blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air’.

The twist: I just got to know last week that my team has been selected for the FLL event in Taiwan in April (It looks like we stood 4th in the overall India ranking. Not bad at all!)