The film tells the story of four undocumented Mexican teenagers who are members of a robotics club at Carl Hayden High School in the barrio of Phoenix; their parents speak no English, and their own horizons are limited.
With the help of dedicated teachers, they build an underwater robot and enter a grueling collegiate competition held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004. The boys figure they might learn something from the older college-age engineers showing off their robots.
The Carl Hayden team— Christian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Luis Aranda, and Oscar Vasquez—get off to a bad start when their robot, nicknamed “Stinky,” takes on water during a practice round on the first day. In one of the film’s many humorous moments, they buy a box of tampons that turn out to have the perfect absorbency for plugging Stinky’s leaks.
After Carl Hayden does the impossible and beats MIT for first place, the film takes a disturbing turn that left me and the rest of the preview audience in tears.
A decade after the competition, MIT professors invited the winners to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a reunion with the MIT team they beat. Not surprisingly, the losers were now winning engineers; one of the MIT graduates had gone on to invent ear buds for Apple.
Pope Leo decried conditions for Palestinians in Gaza in his Christmas sermon, in an unusually direct...
ust before she boarded her flight at Logan airport on 20 November, she was arrested by...
