India, Nov. 22 -- In October this year, five students from modest government schools packed their bags and boarded a flight to Panama City. They were on their way to represent India at the FIRST Global Challenge - an international robotics competition featuring teams from 193 countries. Their journey began far from global attention, in a small and often overlooked Atal Tinkering Lab on their school campus.
These are not the students who typically find themselves on global STEM stages. For Gouresh, the team's lead programmer, the lab opened a doorway to a long-standing fascination with machine logic. For Ningaraj, raised by a single mother working in housekeeping, it offered possibilities that once seemed distant. A decade ago, such a story...