I received the link to this video some days ago from Oso, who ran into one of the subjects of the piece — our mutual friend Marvin Hall — up at Stanford U the other day. I met Marvin, who is Jamaican, at the Global Voices summit in London in 2005, and the long-memoried among you might remember that I blogged about him last January, when the robotics team he took from Kingston to the Northern California First LEGO League won a special award for being the team that “came the furthest and overcame the most obstacles to attend”.

In an e-mail I had from him recently, Marvin — who became a Stanford Digital Vision Fellow last year — tells me he’s been working on a project called Robotics Stimul-I, which will use LEGO robotics workshops to motivate children in Jamaica’s inner city communities to increase their literacy and numeracy. This coming July he’ll be launching a six-month pilot in Kingston, which will also offer workshops in filmmaking, photography and music. He’ll also be preparing a team to compete in the 2007 World Robotics Olympiad in Taipei, Taiwan in November.

Marvin’s work excites me not only because the teaching of science and math are two seriously deficient areas in the Caribbean education system, and because I feel that educators in this region are routinely failing to connect with the ways that children in the 21st century learn. It excites me as well for the very basic reason outlined here by Ethan:

Marvin sees a very stark choice for the youth he’s working with – they exercise their minds through robotics or other forms of creative expression, or there’s a good chance they’ll end up trapped in the violence that surrounds them.

So take a look at Marvin’s video. And a side note to Machel, just in case he and his crew decide to get copyright-happy on me for running a video that uses one of his tracks: “We Not Givin’ Up” is the perfect soundtrack for this programme. You should be proud they used it.