Tech 101 4 Kids Presentation at Roosevelt Elementary School

On June 18th, I gave my largest talk yet – over 100 kids at the Roosevelt School in Hawthorne, NJ.

I began the presentation by putting on a blue gardening glove. This glove was retrofitted with aluminum foil and wires wrapped around each finger, leading to a MaKey MaKey on the table. This let me control the PowerPoint by tapping my fingers together: pointer finger to go to the next slide, middle finger for the previous slide.

The kids were instantly overjoyed. How was I doing this? Well, the MaKey MaKey is a circuit board that can turn any object that conducts electricity into a computer keyboard. So I used it to turn each of my fingers into a different key.

I talked about how I got into robotics as a kid: my first real experience with robotics was getting the LEGO Mindstorms kit in elementary school. I showed several robots I had built out of LEGOs, including an acrobatic rover bot that could flip over when it hit a wall The Dark Knight style and a security bot that throws ping pong balls and when it detects intruders.

From then on, I put robotics aside for a bit as I got into messing around computers. I built websites and programmed games in middle school, and then I studied computer repair in high school and started a computer repair company to raise money for college. Now, at MIT, I’m doing a blend of everything, from robotics to programming to electronics to entrepreneurship.

Giving this map of my journey showed the kids (and the teachers) how something as simple as playing with robotic-infused LEGOs can turn into a life-changing love and pursuit of technology.

After the talks, it was onto the demos: my mother presented the Horizon Fuel Cell Car, a car powered by water. You poured water into the beakers on the car’s back and connect a battery to it. Then the battery runs a current through the water and splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen collects in the fuel cell and powers the toy car on it’s own without the battery. Sounds complicated, but the kids followed along and loved it. The car lit up and zipped around the table.

Lastly, I showed the kids our video on BOB the Vegetation Relocator. BOB is an Ardunio robot with a LEGO chassis and pincer that can pick up and move around flower pots. It was built and programmed by my three little brothers, Bryan, Brandon, and Joseph. The kids loved the video-and they clapped when BOB successfully moved the cup.

I ended by telling the kids how they don’t have to wait to be adults to start messing around with technology. There’s teenagers starting companies, 10 year olds making apps, preschoolers building robots. And these kids aren’t super-smart-one-of-a-kind kids, they just spend their afterschool time actively making things instead of passively using them. In fact, I firmly believe this so much so that the basis of our summer workshop this year was teaching elementary and middle school kids how to program games.

The question isn’t “what do I want to be when I grow up?”. It’s “what do I want to be right now?”