Last year while judging a statewide IT competition for school students, we saw a young boy who had brought in his own homemade clock. Sound familiar? But we didn't arrest him, we gave him first prize, writes Mark Pesce.

Every August for the past three years I've woken up way too early on a cold Saturday morning to meet up with primary and secondary school kids from across New South Wales.

Each of them has been working hard on an IT project, bringing them along to the statewide competition round for Young ICT Explorers. Last year, more than 200 students participated, representing 28 public, independent and Catholic schools.

I am really lucky, because I have a reputation for being one of the geekier judges (guilty!) so I get all the unusual (and usually fun) projects. This year was all robots, robots, robots, because 2012 Young Australian of the Year Marita Cheng has been bringing her Robogals road show to schools around the state, showing year five girls just how much fun they can have playing with servomotors and sensors.

Each year the projects become more sophisticated, because kids are going out onto YouTube, watching a hundred hours of instructional videos (some made by other kids), using what they've learned to build amazing things. That's one reason I love being a judge in the competition - these kids have an infectious ingenuity and inventiveness, because a kid doesn't know what they can't do.

There's always at least one project that stands head-and-shoulders above the others, and last year was no different, with the last of the projects I judged that morning falling into this category.

When we walked up, our judges clipboards in hand, we a found a single student standing next to a white box almost as tall as him. More about that box in a moment.

The student told us that his playground at Wahroonga Public School scheduled separate play periods for the various years, but that students often forgot which play period was theirs, and that led to frequent arguments on the playground. Wanting to engineer a solution the problem, he fabricated a device that informed students - via a bright LED display - who was permitted on the playground during any specific period of time.

And I do mean engineered. This was no off-the-shelf bit of kit, but a sophisticated, custom computer design built around the guts of a Raspberry Pi - the $35 credit card-sized computer that has revolutionised IT teaching throughout primary and secondary educational systems.

This boy taught himself how to wire the LED display to the Raspberry Pi - quite a bit of trial-and-error there, as it turned out - then learned how to write programs to draw messages on the display. Finally, he had to write a sophisticated scheduling program, so the right messages would show up at the right times of day.

I was gobsmacked. I've seen uni graduates in computer science display less depth in IT skills than this 11-year-old, year 6 student.

Now for the punch-line: the big white box had a wall clock stuck right into it, with a scrolling LED display underneath. You could see the time and read the LED display - spelling out who had rights to the playground - simultaneously.

Now I get to tell you something that doesn't matter at all - this 11-year-old boy was of Indian ancestry. A bright spark, the son of immigrant parents, who had built a big electronic clock.

Sound familiar?

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Over the last 48 hours, as the whole ugly story of Ahmed Mohamed unfolded - a 14 year-old child of immigrants, who brought in a digital clock he'd designed to show his teachers, and who got arrested, suspected of bringing a bomb to school - I remembered that day, just over a year ago, when I got an opportunity to work with a boy a few years younger, another child of immigrants, who had done pretty much the same thing.

But here's the kicker: we didn't arrest that boy. Oh no. He won first prize that morning. He'd earned it.

The only suspicions we had were about his capabilities. His device was incredibly sophisticated - well beyond what we thought an 11-year-old could do. So we asked him a series of very technical questions about its construction and operation. This 11-year-old answered them flawlessly, detailing each of the steps in his creative process. He wasn't faking it. He really knew his stuff.

"Where did you learn all this?" we asked finally.

"Oh," he replied, "I watched a lot of videos."

The thing to note here - and I reckon it's also true in Ahmed Mohamed's case - is that millions of people around the world are sharing these skills with one another. They're teaching one another how to do cool things with electronics - like building clocks - because they're geeks and they really get into it.

This is the way we can encourage our kids to excel at STEM. We needs those skills as never before, to chart a way through a century where technology will be at the centre of nearly everything we do to earn a living. We can not freak out the next time some youngster comes up with something that blows our minds. We can't use kids as the projection screen for all of our subconscious fears.

It's already bad enough that we discourage young women from pursuing STEM by subtly implying that it isn't feminine. (That's one reason why Marita Cheng's work with Robogals is so important to the future of the nation.)

If we send the message that anyone who isn't white enough or Christian enough or male enough shouldn't be playing with technology, we'll cut ourselves off completely from a range of futures we will need going forward.

It's good to see that Obama has already invited Ahmed to the White House. Perhaps the US president can put Ahmed's clock on the mantle of the fireplace in the Oval Office. That's where it belongs - as a sign, a marker, and a promise for the future.

Mark Pesce is the honorary associate in the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney. His website is at www.markpesce.com.