Made in Humane Club
My name is Sabi. I am a 9-year-old Gujarati girl, and I live in Delhi, India. Let me tell you why I am interested in building technology.
My parents make technology. My mother builds websites, and my dad runs AI at The Times of India. My grandfather ran a business called Parikh Enterprises, which manufactured transformers for the electricity grid.
But most of my knowledge about technology comes from movies and books that have inspired me.
When I was six years old, I saw Avengers. My favorite character was Iron Man. He wasn’t a God like Thor. He wasn’t a trained soldier like Captain America. He was a normal human being, yet he led the Avengers because of his clever use of technology.
In the Avengers, I saw how Tony Stark spent most of his time designing, building, and testing his products. It was hard work. Sure, he was a cool dude, but he was also very focused.
I also tried to build things. But I figured out that my skill set was very low. When I was around 5 or 6, all I could do was craft. So, when I wanted to start my own business, I made and sold bookmarks. When I was a little older, I was able to make models of ISRO rockets using craft. Then, I started making Tulsi Tea because it was simple to do. First, I’d separate the leaves from the stem, steam them, then I would dry them on towels. But this was a tedious task to do. As I got older, I lost interest in such products, and eventually in my business, Snug Monsters.
At eight, I got to go on a pilgrimage to Sabarimala Temple in Kerala. When I returned, I was so inspired that I wanted to write a travelogue. However, I did not have photographs of all the fun we had on the pilgrimage. So, my father bought me a course on how to create images using ChatGPT. This helped me complete my travelogue.
My mother also bought me a book called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. In it, a poor young boy from Africa wanted to give his family electricity and built a windmill which supplied electricity to his house.
Later, when my parents bought a house, I saw how science influenced everything from structure to interior design. I spent my summer holidays with Mishraji, our electrician. He taught me how electricity works, how to cut wires, how switches work, and how to stay safe when working with electricity.
When I was nine, I watched a Japanese anime called Dr. Stone, in which I learned that everything around us, from a matchstick to a bar of soap, is technology. Dr. Stone had to reinvent all of it.
So, why am I telling you all this? Even though I liked technology, I did not have the skills to build technology. So I asked my mother to teach me.
She said, “Computational Thinking is the foundation of technology”.
In fact, I remember watching the movie Enola Holmes, where a young girl used sequencing, patterns, debugging, and decomposition to find her mother. In Enola Holmes 2, she used all of these concepts with another concept called functions to find a missing girl. Her clever use of these concepts helped her solve both of those cases.
In this book, I am writing everything I understood about Computational Thinking in short stories so children like me can understand them.