The Robot My Niece Built

My eleven-year-old niece entered the regional robotics fair with a robot she built from a kit, a shoebox, two old phone chargers and her grandfather's broken desk lamp. Its only job was to water a houseplant when the soil got dry.

She named it Fernando. It had googly eyes. It made a beeping noise that sounded, she insisted, "like happiness."

At the fair, it was surrounded by very serious robots built by very serious teenagers. Fernando watered his plant, beeped, and then, for reasons nobody understood, spun in a slow circle. The judges laughed so hard one of them had to sit down.

She didn't win first place. She won "Most Charming Robot," a category the judges invented on the spot. She carried the ribbon around for a week. Fernando now lives on her windowsill, still watering the same plant, still beeping happily every morning at seven.