On NPR’s Weekend Edition for Saturday, April 16, 2005, Susan Stamberg told how four high school kids from Tempe, Arizona won a major national robotics competition: Students Master Robotics, Beat Odds:

Four high school kids from western Phoenix and an underwater robot named Stinky beat out the nation’s brightest students (including a team from M.I.T) in the 2004 Marine Advanced Technology Education Center Remotely Operated Vehicle Competition. It’s a boost to their college hopes, which had been far from a sure thing due to financial disadvantages.

The journey of the Carl Hayden High School team is chronicled in Wired magazine and raises issues surrounding college funding for the children of immigrants. Susan Stamberg talks to two of the members, Cristian Arcega and Lorenzo Santillan. We also hear from their computer science teacher, Allan Cameron.

Praise for the feature, which tells a great story and raises important questions about inequitable funding, but with a bit of a quibble. Surely, in the sort of open-ended definition of intelligence I espouse in Grow With the Flow, the creative problem solving, knowledge of a subject area, and intense teamwork (personal intelligence) that won this competition represents a high level of real-world intelligence? And at this competition, by definition, this team had more of the requisite package of intelligence than any other team? Then what does it mean to say that this team “beat out the nation’s brightest students"? At that moment, in that setting, they were the nation’s brightest students. They may have beaten the odds, but it seems to me that they haven’t outpaced the assumptions about intelligence that guided that choice of words.