The Boy Genius of Ulan Bator in Mongolia, “Battushig, 16, led me down a steep incline into the building’s underground garage …. Many children in the city play in their apartment buildings’ driveways, but this one seemed oriented in a particularly dangerous way. Battushig worried about his 10-year-old sister and her friends being hit by an exiting car. Standing in the concrete space, its aqua walls nicked, he pointed overhead to a white box containing a sensor from which he had run wires to a siren with a flashing red light outside in the building’s driveway. His Garage Siren gave his sister and the other children time to get out of the way when a car was coming.” …
The project impressed officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — where Battushig planned to apply for college — but at that point they were already aware of his abilities. Two months earlier, Battushig, then 15, became one of 340 students out of 150,000 to earn a perfect score in Circuits and Electronics, a sophomore-level class at M.I.T. and the first Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC — a college course filmed and broadcast free or nearly free to anyone with an Internet connection — offered by the university.
Read the full article on the NY times .
I wish all our traffic engineers were coming from Ulan Bator and were so motivated by children safety!