Dallas Hackers Are Already Helping Ahmed Mohamed with His Next Inventions

[octoberlib]

The local Dallas hacking community has Ahmed Mohamed's back.Mohamed was handcuffed and interrogated without a lawyer or his parents present, and there was fear he would be charged with making a "hoax bomb," even though the student insisted his device was merely a homemade clock. His school, Irving MacArthur High, sent a letter home with students informing parents that the police department "responded to a suspicious-looking item on campus" Monday.

If his school won't support a student who is clearly interested in science, engineering, and tinkering, the local hacking community says it will. A local hacker who goes by the name of WhiskeyNeon has given Mohamed a year-long membership to TheLab.ms, a new hackerspace in the Dallas metro area, and other members of the space are working on getting him a lifetime membership.

"We're giving him an Arduino, solar panels, a lot of hardware as encouragement because we support what he's doing," WhiskeyNeon told me in a phone conversation. "As a hacker community, this is our backyard. We're going to stand up and show people what this is all about. We want to encourage him."

"This kid took the initiative to make something and brought it to school. The leadership of the school was too ignorant to realize what the child had done—that shows how bad the education system is when it comes to STEM," he added. "I'm ashamed the public school system would react like this and frankly I'm astounded his happened to him."

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dallas-hackers-are-already-helping-ahmed-mohamed-with-his-next-inventions



#IstandwithAhmed is trending on Twitter. People are tweeting pictures of themselves with clocks along with the hashtag.

[flobee1]

1. Sad

An intelligent underground community using aliases workig to give this very smart kid an education that his school should be providing for him. Instead, his school has him arrested.
This country is screwed

[valerief]

2. Education taxes go to textbooks about Newt Gingrich and tax refunds to billionaires. nt

[w0nderer]

6. umm not that 'underground'

https://thelab.ms/

a hackerspace isn't really 'underground'
and most people i know that go to hackerspace and makerspace (closely related)
use nicknames / handles
it's part of the culture

are there people at some hacker (and maker) spaces that you probably should keep far from your computer?
sure there are...they aren't the majority

hacker space, space for someone who makes a clever "modification, code or invention aka a 'hack'" with their stuff

think computerclub meets astronomy club meets mathclub meets science club meets any other geeky cool sciency thing you can imagine (including mechanics chemistry and so on)

[pangaia]

7. It's not so much the country but fucking republicans,.

Republicanism should be illegal.

[left-of-center2012]

3. A cop looked at the closk and asked ...

What does it do?

IT TELLS TIME YOU IFFIN DUMMY !

[ut oh]

4. Good on this hacker group

The Ahmed and his parents should sue the f*&% out of the school and the police dept. Quite honestly, the teacher should be fired (IMO). This is not an act of encouraging STEM education, but scaring students away from it.

It is sickening to think that these educators did something like this to a student.

I'm really glad to see so many people standing up for Ahmed.