I don't either. But using quotes around the statement, and then indicating where its being cited from is next. And Keith where are you doing this? An Activity Bot and a XBee? Interesting pairing.
The kids I teach made it so the ActivityBot can be controlled with a Joystick. Now I'm trying to do it wirelessly. Got it moving, but now I want to be able to pass info differently to control speed.
Later I hope to make it pass sonar data, so the kids navigate a maze using Ping data without physically seeing the robot. Should be cool.
The main thing is working on it in public to raise awareness that not everything with wires is a bomb. Hopefully I don't get tazed.
Dave Jones mentioned "A state where they teach creationism in public schools"
It's not clear to me that is a reflection on any particular religion rather than an objection to unsubstantiated theories being injected into education.
I'm all for a study of any and every religion in school.
Personally, I think most people would be uneasy. I realize a lot of people today have never even seen a firecracker. It was not an electronics class. In today's world you might risk having the police called if you brought a water gun to school.
Consider this: would it be reasonable for an electronics enthusiast to wonder if this clock could also be an electronic trigger?
The issue is both in the politicization of this stuff, and the resulting fear and doubt. People fear things they do not understand, and that's an ordinary human thing. It needs to be managed, of course. But the doubt is the more disturbing trend here.
When intent is in doubt, that fear due to lack of understanding gets amplified. And that is what triggers, "It could be a BOMB!" with the all too familiar outcome.
I took by ELF II loaded with expansion boards, a homemade power supply, etc. to school back in the 80's, I'm sure that would be frowned upon these days.
I earned a trip to the principles office in the first grade for drawing simple series and parallel circuit examples. Simple battery, switch and light bulbs, silver crayon on black construction paper.
It was intended as a positive experience; look at what little Chris can do. To a first grader it was more like being in dark room with a light in my face being interrogated for high crimes.
I didn't make any of those drawings for a very long time after...
Wow, those must have been awesome images. Works of art!
School is often a disaster. More of a prison sentence than an educational experience.
At some point in high school in geography we were learning about stalagmite and stalactite formations in caves.
I put my hand up and suggested a way to remember which is which. "Mights go up and tights come down" I said.
It was something I had read in some book or other and seemed quite innocent.
The young female geography teacher took it really badly. My end of year report read "...is a disruptive influence on the class". Which was amazing considering what a zoo of chaos and violence that little village school was.
I was not allowed to study geography the following year.
I remember being called to the office, putting down my drink while in art class, and walking in to a room with my teacher, principle, superintendent, counselor, and 2 cops. I'd sketched some rifles and attack helicopters in my folder and my teacher found it.
I didn't get arrested though. I just told them I thought they were pretty stupid to go through all that over sketches in my folder, went back to art class, and finished my drink.
I was later told they were surprised I graduated. I said me too, I always figured I should drop out, buy the books, and teach myself in a couple months to save a ton of time.
On the bright side, our public school system has a lot of room to improve.
Back in my school, let's call it "high school", there was only one teacher we could communicate with on a human to a human basis. He was the metal work teacher. Do they say "shop class" in the USA?
A lot of time with him was not about metalwork. Although I loved using those big old lathes and mills we had in school. No, he spoke of history, politics, philosophy, ethics, many things.
He took me aside one day and said "The best thing you can do is get out of here as soon as possible". Quite the opposite of what we were being sold as the "sensible" thing to do by everyone in that place.
That was it. I left school at 15 and enrolled at the local technical college. Wow! There is a civilization out there!
Sometimes I think that pretty much everything I ever learned was learned outside of those years in school.
Yep shop class, wood shop, etc. I learned the most there also. It's where I found out about a CAD competition, won it, and got all my job offers before I graduated.
Parts of college sucked too, but honestly I've yet to hear of a perfect education system.
But honestly, did this kid make anything? When I took apart my alarm clock I took the audio out and put it through an amplifier I made (much less impressive than what many of you likely did). I think this kid basically glued an existing clock to an existing suitcase. Is that the situation?
Oh boy, that was a dream of a future world when I was in high school.
I think this kid basically glued an existing clock to an existing suitcase. Is that the situation?
As far as I can tell from reading around and watching Ahmed on video, yes.
He also used the words "my invention" for it. Which perhaps shows he has no clue about anything.
On the other hand...He obviously took something apart. He rearranged it into something else. The something else still worked, the beeping alerted the teacher.
That is where every nerdy geek starts. What all us curious humans should be doing all the time. Especially when young.
May be there was nothing much to it. But it was already more than his teachers or the police around him ever did.
Even if he just put a existing clock into a suitcase, I simply find it disturbing that none of the adults where able to see that besides some electronics nothing was in that suitcase.
And without any explosive material it can't be a bomb.
And electronics usually do no explode. Well caps may do that. But to do real damage you need quite huge caps.
It is a quite sad state of education if multiple 'teacher' are not able to come to that conclusion. And that two police officers, who should be at least trained to use weapons think a empty suitcase with a clock can EXPLODE is beyond my understanding.
What I have seen here in the US of A is that Americans usually adore children, pamper them and keep them away from any DANGER, including Wood Workshops, Soldering Classes, Metal Work and even out door activities like swimming or camping or making a fire to burn them marshmellows(spelling?).
Sadly they do not learn any skills that way. There are exceptions, but a lot of the younger people I met here are quite helpless in fixing anything by themselves.
Heck, they even sell instant scrambled eggs here, ready to be mixed with water and thrown into a pan (or even Microwave in case you do not even own a pan)
WTF can you do wrong by throwing some real eggs into a pan?
As I said before, some time after the 1950's something went really wrong with our world.
I am even not sure if it would have made a difference if the Guys name had been Bill Smith and not Ahmed whatever. Texas or not. Maybe less Media Coverage.
Here in California a Prison Guard makes ~$100+K and a Teacher ~$40+K.
I thought they'd arrested him because they thought he'd made an imitation bomb. Which if you think of it (at least when I think of it), it's tough to think of many other intents/uses for what he made than a movie prop bomb.
That said, he made it. He didn't use it in a way that such a reaction should be intended for.
If a kid eats a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun (what this kid did) I see nothing wrong with that. If a kid made a wooden gun, painted it black, and pointed it at other kids at school, I see something wrong with that.
He didn't leave it in the bathroom, he didn't intend any bomb squad BS (from the looks of things). It seems like he made something that looked like a bomb without bad intent and didn't think of how adults would overreact.
It's just too hard for me to imagine that many people mistaking it for an actual bomb. But then again, people are pretty dumb lately. Now that it's sensationalized we'll probably never know the truth.
It's all about Zero Tolerance which came into being after two junior psychopaths decided to murder a bunch of kids at a school called Columbine.
Zero Tolerance takes away decision making from the locals so as to protect them from lawsuits when one of their students goes on a murderous rampage.
After that, things just went pear shaped. Principals and teachers who already viewed their charges as little more than cattle now had a new tool, in their arsenal of student control. They could drug you into zombie, now they can expel a kid and put a blackmark on his record that will follow him through the education machine for the slightest of infractions.
What happened to Ahmed isn't particularly bad, he got a E-ticket out of it(MIT, Twitter and Google apparently considers him a genius because he took a clock apart). The rest of kids who run afoul of the Zero Tolerance program like boys who played cops and robbers or the one who ate a Pop Tart into a L shape or wear a t-shirt with the American flag get expelled and worse.
I feel sorry for bright, inquisitive kids in today's public schools, it's no place for them.
Ahh, zero tolerance. As a parent, I took great pleasure in finding, highlighting and marginalizing scenarios related to zero tolerance.
There are always exceptions.
Really, the intent of Zero Tolerance is good. That intent is fewer problems and easy solutions to them.
The execution of ZT is deeply flawed. First, we are regulated by four basic forces: law, social norms, money and physics.
Law does not actually prevent it, whatever it is. Law sets the cost or penalty for hang or attempting to do it.
The same is true for norms. We do something and our peers shun us, for example. They could cheer us too. Not all is dark and foreboding.
Physics actually does prevent things, as it's all about the world and what it permits us to do. Of course the smarter we are, the better this tends to be.
Money can prevent it too. It costs too much.
The flaw in zero tolerance lies in that law is not an absolute thing. There are and will remain genuine ambiguities we address case by case.
With kids, they are by nature going to make mistakes and demonstrate poor judgement. We do not mature in our executive functions until sometime in our 20s, yet ZT requires or implies adult performance out of non adults.
This is silly, harmful, and futile.
The big issue I connect to this is the failure of way too many of us to both understand the dynamics I put here as well as unwillingness to recognize the work required to raise people to adulthood.
ZT sidesteps all of that, cookie cutter style, merely selecting for compliant kids. But, what we really need to do is educate kids
These are not the same thing.
Learning math is no different than learning where social boundaries are, or why stealing or lying is bad.
ZT does not allow kids to fail, learn, grow and then experience success.
We lose out because of this.
Instead of sharing the burden of raising our kids into great people, we avoid that work and just favor the ones that complied.
So many creative, smart, free thinking kids get caught up in ZT scenarios and because it is ZT, there can be no meaningful growth in their experiences, nor opportunity to demonstrate that growth.
I find it all very highly unacceptable and offensive. As a parent, I did push back on ZT numerous times, often having to pull my kids out if school, get the education and parenting done outside the regressive shackles of ZT and the ignorance it breeds.
If we cannot take an interest in out young people, get to know them, encourage them, and allow the to fail, we also cannot allow them to succeed either.
Funny thing too. If you face these strong, authoritarian ZT advocates and have a business discussion with them, the idea of failure and development, growth, etc... all seem like good things, and we often see the failure celebrated as taking a risk, making an investment, and doing what it takes to succeed.
Next time you are faced with ZT I encourage you to take an active role in making sure it's effects are marginalized when the young person and their good intent warrant it.
That is precisely why Ahmed is getting attention. ZT is lazy, and it snuffs bright souls out every day.
...unless, of course, others are there to have their backs and let them know it is OK to be a kid, fail, make mistakes as long as they learn from them and demonstrate good intent to become great people.
Honest to goodness. My real 7th grade science project was two nails driven though a piece of plywood. I took an old extension cord, split the wires and attached them to the nails. I then would slide a hot dog across the two nails (hot dog lenght apart) and plug it in for 20 or 30 seconds. It made the best hot dogs - very juicy. TALK about dangerous! ;-)
I would be terrified if they let a child do that and take it to school now! Sorry - I know this isn't really on topic, but times have changed.
Our principal used a similar setup to cook hot dogs for a special event when I was in grade 7. Only difference I can recall is that he could cook several at once and used a light switch to turn the power on and off.
The kids a Maker now? Dissassembling an alarm clock bought from the Goodwill store for $1 and stuffing it into a suitcase secured with wires is 'tEh sCi3nce!' ?
I'm not thrilled with the current crop of teachers in general, however they are charged with the care of hundreds of children every day, and the FBI and Govt. is always pushing their "See Something, Say Something" situational awareness thing.
If this had been something more nefarious, how many of you would be slating the teachers for not having had the common sense to detain, evacuate or whatever?
This was pretty in tune with what my gut was saying. Granted he had an "offensive" tone.
Unless he added functionality with the thing being in a suitcase, what else is it but something to intentionally look like a bomb? If it went off in class, it almost certainly means he scheduled the alarm to do so.
Heck, he even had to plug it in during class. If he didn't have a battery in there he had to have set the alarm during class to make it go off in class.
My gut was telling me this was a political stunt, and some of the stuff he said is further evidence of that.
Anyway, we do need more kids to make and invent stuff, and we should all do our part to help support that. As it happens I'm teaching some kids tomorrow using the ActivityBoard.
While I don't think he should have been arrested, I do have a problem with his description of the stuff as his "invention". According to this article, he just took apart a 1986 Micronta digital alarm clock and put the guts into a Vaultz Locking Pencil Box. Not so much an invention as a re-packaging. And the original article I read said that the engineering teacher told him to keep it in his backpack, but it 'beeped' while he was in another class, which brought attention to it. It appears to need AC power, so I'm not sure how it went off while in his backpack. I'm assuming the 9-volt battery connector (which is pictured without a battery) is to keep the time through a power outage, not to power the clock.
Seems all and everyone wants to get some 'face time' over this going viral... nobody seems innocent. Visits to talk show, gifts from Microsoft, etc.... And sadly a lot of bashing about educators.
So, it really seems 'the media is the mess'.. if you hit the right hot buttons, the media attention showers you with rewards, and with harsh criticism. In a year or two, nobody will remember this kid.
It is plausible that this was an intentional hoax if you accept what The Rebel asserts are overlooked facts. And it seems that suspension from school for 3 days is quite appropriate for bringing a fake bomb to school. There wasn't much for show and tell, it was just an electronic clock removed from its own chassis and inserted in another box -- no programing, no actual creative learning involved, just kid's hacking junk.
While this obviously was NOT 'bomb dangerous' -- no chemicals, no explosives; exposed AC Mains wiring at the transformer would have been enough for any teacher or responsible adult to be justified to confiscate it as a potential hazard to all.
But it is extremely hard to get anything in authority right these days with the media going viral over tantalizing tidbits of content and the need to seize breaking news to sustain readership.
I really do believe in this case, the media has gotten us all worked up.
BTW, Parallax and others really make an effort to produce educational products that are lower voltage and completely avoid an AC Mains safety hazard by using approved wall warts.
Nonetheless, by the time I was 14 years old I had completely rewired the basement with added lighting and outlets in electrical conduit, including adding circuit breakers for all of it (but without the required local electrical inspections and permits). Learned it all from Popular Mechanics, Science and Mechanics, Popular Electronics, and other DIY publications of that era.
He isn't too young to handle these tasks safely... just needs adult mentoring about what is safe, responsible, and wise.
The "media" in the case seems to have been a lot of people tweeting, facebooking, youtubeing and blogging etc. Oh, and posting to forums like this one here
The mainstream media picked up on all that and no doubt took it for a ride. As is their wont now a days. Actual journalism having died a death some time ago.
I see it all now:
Ahmed is just a dumb kid who threw some junk parts into a box.
The dumb teacher took it the wrong way.
The dumb police took it even further.
This goes all the way to the dumb president and the facebook guy who now think Ahmed is a genius.
It's like Springfield from bottom to top.
Then of course there is the dumb me who posted here, as if anything actually ever happened
My point was it's not the same media that disparaged, and slaughtered, the poor lemmings.
In this case, and in many now a days, it starts with regular people on the ground tweeting stuff. Which lights a fire around the internet, and here we are. "Gone viral" as they say. God I hate that term.
Of course the lemming killers make hey out it as well when they get hold of it. Followed by the industrial and political leaders apparently, who see a chance to make themselves look good.
Comments
The kids I teach made it so the ActivityBot can be controlled with a Joystick. Now I'm trying to do it wirelessly. Got it moving, but now I want to be able to pass info differently to control speed.
Later I hope to make it pass sonar data, so the kids navigate a maze using Ping data without physically seeing the robot. Should be cool.
The main thing is working on it in public to raise awareness that not everything with wires is a bomb. Hopefully I don't get tazed.
Sorry if I have missed a point here.
Dave Jones mentioned "A state where they teach creationism in public schools"
It's not clear to me that is a reflection on any particular religion rather than an objection to unsubstantiated theories being injected into education.
I'm all for a study of any and every religion in school.
Consider this: would it be reasonable for an electronics enthusiast to wonder if this clock could also be an electronic trigger?
The issue is both in the politicization of this stuff, and the resulting fear and doubt. People fear things they do not understand, and that's an ordinary human thing. It needs to be managed, of course. But the doubt is the more disturbing trend here.
When intent is in doubt, that fear due to lack of understanding gets amplified. And that is what triggers, "It could be a BOMB!" with the all too familiar outcome.
But those are exactly the problems. How did the world get into such a sorry state? And should we just give up and accept it as normal?
I say no.
I earned a trip to the principles office in the first grade for drawing simple series and parallel circuit examples. Simple battery, switch and light bulbs, silver crayon on black construction paper.
It was intended as a positive experience; look at what little Chris can do. To a first grader it was more like being in dark room with a light in my face being interrogated for high crimes.
I didn't make any of those drawings for a very long time after...
C.W.
Wow, those must have been awesome images. Works of art!
School is often a disaster. More of a prison sentence than an educational experience.
At some point in high school in geography we were learning about stalagmite and stalactite formations in caves.
I put my hand up and suggested a way to remember which is which. "Mights go up and tights come down" I said.
It was something I had read in some book or other and seemed quite innocent.
The young female geography teacher took it really badly. My end of year report read "...is a disruptive influence on the class". Which was amazing considering what a zoo of chaos and violence that little village school was.
I was not allowed to study geography the following year.
I remember being called to the office, putting down my drink while in art class, and walking in to a room with my teacher, principle, superintendent, counselor, and 2 cops. I'd sketched some rifles and attack helicopters in my folder and my teacher found it.
I didn't get arrested though. I just told them I thought they were pretty stupid to go through all that over sketches in my folder, went back to art class, and finished my drink.
I was later told they were surprised I graduated. I said me too, I always figured I should drop out, buy the books, and teach myself in a couple months to save a ton of time.
On the bright side, our public school system has a lot of room to improve.
Back in my school, let's call it "high school", there was only one teacher we could communicate with on a human to a human basis. He was the metal work teacher. Do they say "shop class" in the USA?
A lot of time with him was not about metalwork. Although I loved using those big old lathes and mills we had in school. No, he spoke of history, politics, philosophy, ethics, many things.
He took me aside one day and said "The best thing you can do is get out of here as soon as possible". Quite the opposite of what we were being sold as the "sensible" thing to do by everyone in that place.
That was it. I left school at 15 and enrolled at the local technical college. Wow! There is a civilization out there!
Sometimes I think that pretty much everything I ever learned was learned outside of those years in school.
Parts of college sucked too, but honestly I've yet to hear of a perfect education system.
But honestly, did this kid make anything? When I took apart my alarm clock I took the audio out and put it through an amplifier I made (much less impressive than what many of you likely did). I think this kid basically glued an existing clock to an existing suitcase. Is that the situation?
He also used the words "my invention" for it. Which perhaps shows he has no clue about anything.
On the other hand...He obviously took something apart. He rearranged it into something else. The something else still worked, the beeping alerted the teacher.
That is where every nerdy geek starts. What all us curious humans should be doing all the time. Especially when young.
May be there was nothing much to it. But it was already more than his teachers or the police around him ever did.
Everyone starts somewhere.
And without any explosive material it can't be a bomb.
And electronics usually do no explode. Well caps may do that. But to do real damage you need quite huge caps.
It is a quite sad state of education if multiple 'teacher' are not able to come to that conclusion. And that two police officers, who should be at least trained to use weapons think a empty suitcase with a clock can EXPLODE is beyond my understanding.
What I have seen here in the US of A is that Americans usually adore children, pamper them and keep them away from any DANGER, including Wood Workshops, Soldering Classes, Metal Work and even out door activities like swimming or camping or making a fire to burn them marshmellows(spelling?).
Sadly they do not learn any skills that way. There are exceptions, but a lot of the younger people I met here are quite helpless in fixing anything by themselves.
Heck, they even sell instant scrambled eggs here, ready to be mixed with water and thrown into a pan (or even Microwave in case you do not even own a pan)
WTF can you do wrong by throwing some real eggs into a pan?
As I said before, some time after the 1950's something went really wrong with our world.
I am even not sure if it would have made a difference if the Guys name had been Bill Smith and not Ahmed whatever. Texas or not. Maybe less Media Coverage.
Here in California a Prison Guard makes ~$100+K and a Teacher ~$40+K.
Sad
Mike
I thought they'd arrested him because they thought he'd made an imitation bomb. Which if you think of it (at least when I think of it), it's tough to think of many other intents/uses for what he made than a movie prop bomb.
That said, he made it. He didn't use it in a way that such a reaction should be intended for.
If a kid eats a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun (what this kid did) I see nothing wrong with that. If a kid made a wooden gun, painted it black, and pointed it at other kids at school, I see something wrong with that.
He didn't leave it in the bathroom, he didn't intend any bomb squad BS (from the looks of things). It seems like he made something that looked like a bomb without bad intent and didn't think of how adults would overreact.
It's just too hard for me to imagine that many people mistaking it for an actual bomb. But then again, people are pretty dumb lately. Now that it's sensationalized we'll probably never know the truth.
Zero Tolerance takes away decision making from the locals so as to protect them from lawsuits when one of their students goes on a murderous rampage.
After that, things just went pear shaped. Principals and teachers who already viewed their charges as little more than cattle now had a new tool, in their arsenal of student control. They could drug you into zombie, now they can expel a kid and put a blackmark on his record that will follow him through the education machine for the slightest of infractions.
What happened to Ahmed isn't particularly bad, he got a E-ticket out of it(MIT, Twitter and Google apparently considers him a genius because he took a clock apart). The rest of kids who run afoul of the Zero Tolerance program like boys who played cops and robbers or the one who ate a Pop Tart into a L shape or wear a t-shirt with the American flag get expelled and worse.
I feel sorry for bright, inquisitive kids in today's public schools, it's no place for them.
There are always exceptions.
Really, the intent of Zero Tolerance is good. That intent is fewer problems and easy solutions to them.
The execution of ZT is deeply flawed. First, we are regulated by four basic forces: law, social norms, money and physics.
Law does not actually prevent it, whatever it is. Law sets the cost or penalty for hang or attempting to do it.
The same is true for norms. We do something and our peers shun us, for example. They could cheer us too. Not all is dark and foreboding.
Physics actually does prevent things, as it's all about the world and what it permits us to do. Of course the smarter we are, the better this tends to be.
Money can prevent it too. It costs too much.
The flaw in zero tolerance lies in that law is not an absolute thing. There are and will remain genuine ambiguities we address case by case.
With kids, they are by nature going to make mistakes and demonstrate poor judgement. We do not mature in our executive functions until sometime in our 20s, yet ZT requires or implies adult performance out of non adults.
This is silly, harmful, and futile.
The big issue I connect to this is the failure of way too many of us to both understand the dynamics I put here as well as unwillingness to recognize the work required to raise people to adulthood.
ZT sidesteps all of that, cookie cutter style, merely selecting for compliant kids. But, what we really need to do is educate kids
These are not the same thing.
Learning math is no different than learning where social boundaries are, or why stealing or lying is bad.
ZT does not allow kids to fail, learn, grow and then experience success.
We lose out because of this.
Instead of sharing the burden of raising our kids into great people, we avoid that work and just favor the ones that complied.
So many creative, smart, free thinking kids get caught up in ZT scenarios and because it is ZT, there can be no meaningful growth in their experiences, nor opportunity to demonstrate that growth.
I find it all very highly unacceptable and offensive. As a parent, I did push back on ZT numerous times, often having to pull my kids out if school, get the education and parenting done outside the regressive shackles of ZT and the ignorance it breeds.
If we cannot take an interest in out young people, get to know them, encourage them, and allow the to fail, we also cannot allow them to succeed either.
Funny thing too. If you face these strong, authoritarian ZT advocates and have a business discussion with them, the idea of failure and development, growth, etc... all seem like good things, and we often see the failure celebrated as taking a risk, making an investment, and doing what it takes to succeed.
Next time you are faced with ZT I encourage you to take an active role in making sure it's effects are marginalized when the young person and their good intent warrant it.
That is precisely why Ahmed is getting attention. ZT is lazy, and it snuffs bright souls out every day.
...unless, of course, others are there to have their backs and let them know it is OK to be a kid, fail, make mistakes as long as they learn from them and demonstrate good intent to become great people.
Our principal used a similar setup to cook hot dogs for a special event when I was in grade 7. Only difference I can recall is that he could cook several at once and used a light switch to turn the power on and off.
The kids a Maker now? Dissassembling an alarm clock bought from the Goodwill store for $1 and stuffing it into a suitcase secured with wires is 'tEh sCi3nce!' ?
Please stop, my sides are killing me.
Here's a good 'Other side of the story' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=343&v=SQHZ0kAInxY
Try to make it past the 2 min mark before replying.
I'm not thrilled with the current crop of teachers in general, however they are charged with the care of hundreds of children every day, and the FBI and Govt. is always pushing their "See Something, Say Something" situational awareness thing.
If this had been something more nefarious, how many of you would be slating the teachers for not having had the common sense to detain, evacuate or whatever?
Unless he added functionality with the thing being in a suitcase, what else is it but something to intentionally look like a bomb? If it went off in class, it almost certainly means he scheduled the alarm to do so.
Heck, he even had to plug it in during class. If he didn't have a battery in there he had to have set the alarm during class to make it go off in class.
My gut was telling me this was a political stunt, and some of the stuff he said is further evidence of that.
Anyway, we do need more kids to make and invent stuff, and we should all do our part to help support that. As it happens I'm teaching some kids tomorrow using the ActivityBoard.
So, it really seems 'the media is the mess'.. if you hit the right hot buttons, the media attention showers you with rewards, and with harsh criticism. In a year or two, nobody will remember this kid.
It is plausible that this was an intentional hoax if you accept what The Rebel asserts are overlooked facts. And it seems that suspension from school for 3 days is quite appropriate for bringing a fake bomb to school. There wasn't much for show and tell, it was just an electronic clock removed from its own chassis and inserted in another box -- no programing, no actual creative learning involved, just kid's hacking junk.
Well, I kind of doubt he came up with this all on his own.
And, kudo's to the teachers, who probably knew the last name, because of his sister.
Considering that, is it really a stretch for some of them to become 'concerned' that it might be dangerous?
But it is extremely hard to get anything in authority right these days with the media going viral over tantalizing tidbits of content and the need to seize breaking news to sustain readership.
I really do believe in this case, the media has gotten us all worked up.
BTW, Parallax and others really make an effort to produce educational products that are lower voltage and completely avoid an AC Mains safety hazard by using approved wall warts.
Nonetheless, by the time I was 14 years old I had completely rewired the basement with added lighting and outlets in electrical conduit, including adding circuit breakers for all of it (but without the required local electrical inspections and permits). Learned it all from Popular Mechanics, Science and Mechanics, Popular Electronics, and other DIY publications of that era.
He isn't too young to handle these tasks safely... just needs adult mentoring about what is safe, responsible, and wise.
The mainstream media picked up on all that and no doubt took it for a ride. As is their wont now a days. Actual journalism having died a death some time ago.
I see it all now:
Ahmed is just a dumb kid who threw some junk parts into a box.
The dumb teacher took it the wrong way.
The dumb police took it even further.
This goes all the way to the dumb president and the facebook guy who now think Ahmed is a genius.
It's like Springfield from bottom to top.
Then of course there is the dumb me who posted here, as if anything actually ever happened
Not sure this is so much about dumb as being human.
In this case, and in many now a days, it starts with regular people on the ground tweeting stuff. Which lights a fire around the internet, and here we are. "Gone viral" as they say. God I hate that term.
Of course the lemming killers make hey out it as well when they get hold of it. Followed by the industrial and political leaders apparently, who see a chance to make themselves look good.