Sylvia of Paraguay — The Girl Who Wants to Know How It Works
Sylvia of Paraguay — The Girl Who Wants to Know How It Works
Sylvia of Paraguay — The Girl Who Wants to Know How It Works
Age: 10
Country: Paraguay
Araceli has a box labeled IMPORTANT PARTS.
Nobody else in her family agrees that the parts are important.
Inside are eleven screws, two springs, a tiny wheel, three buttons, a piece of wire, something that might have once belonged to a toaster, and a metal object that nobody has been able to identify.
Her mother has tried to throw the box away twice.
Ari has rescued it twice.
“You never know,” she explains.
Ari likes knowing how things work.
Not just what they do.
How.
How does a refrigerator know when it's cold enough?
Why does a touchscreen respond to a finger but not always to a pencil?
Who decided where all the letters should go on a keyboard?
And why—this one bothers her enormously—can nobody invent a fitted sheet that is easy to fold?
Ari's family has learned that saying “That's just how it works” is a terrible answer.
It usually produces twelve more questions.
One of the things Ari wondered about most when she was younger was her hearing aid.
Someone had built this tiny thing that sat near her ear and helped make sounds clearer.
But how?
The first time someone explained that microphones could collect sound and turn it into electrical signals, Ari became very quiet.
Her mother thought she had lost interest.
She had not.
She was thinking.
Somebody had looked at a problem and decided to build something that could help.
Ari thought that might be the most wonderful job in the world.
So she started experimenting.
This has not always gone well.
There was the alarm clock incident.
The less said about that, the better.
There was also an unfortunate afternoon involving a flashlight, aluminum foil and one of the IMPORTANT PARTS.
But Ari keeps learning.
She sketches ideas in notebooks.
She watches how things fit together.
She saves broken objects long after everyone else believes they have fulfilled their purpose.
And she decorates almost everything.
Ari strongly objects to the idea that useful things must be boring.
If engineers can figure out how to send machines into space, she sees absolutely no reason they cannot add rhinestones.
Her latest project is her phone case.
She has been placing each tiny bead herself, stopping occasionally to study it through her blue glasses before deciding what belongs where.
Her father asked why it was taking so long.
“I'm improving the design,” Ari told him.
“It already worked.”
Ari looked at him.
“That doesn't mean it was finished.”
Someday, Ari wants to design things that make people's lives easier.
Maybe devices that help people hear.
Maybe technology that helps someone communicate.
Maybe something nobody has thought of yet.
She doesn't know.
She's ten.
She has time.
For now, she keeps asking questions, collecting mysterious screws and looking at ordinary objects as though they are puzzles waiting for her to solve them.
Because whenever Ari sees something that doesn't work quite as well as it could, she doesn't think:
That's just how it is.
She thinks:
I wonder if I can make it better.
Her Dream: To become an engineer and design useful technology that makes everyday life easier—and considerably less boring.
Her Wonder: How many things haven't been invented yet because nobody has asked the right question?
*****
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