French ten-year-old Eva Corot has been accepted to Five by Five's Paris Summer Innovation Fellowship, a PhD-level programme, after catching Five by Five's attention with her plucky and touching pitch.
"The streets of Paris are sad. I want to build a robot that will make them happy again. I've already started learning how to code on Thymio robots, but I have trouble making it work. I want to join the programme so the mentors can help me," Five by Five founding partner Kat Borlongan summarised Corot's pitch on Facebook.
In an open letter announcing Corot's acceptance to the programme, Borlongan replied, "Your application inspired me. There was nothing on the Web site that said the programme was open to ten-year-olds but - as you must have noticed - nothing that said it was not."
"You've openly told us that you had trouble making the robot on your own and needed help. That was a brave thing to admit, and ultimately what convinced us to take on your project. Humility and willingness to learn in order to go beyond our current limitations are at the heart and soul of innovation," Borlongan continued.
The Paris Summer Innovation Fellowship furnishes "20 bright young minds" with "two weeks of funding, tools, space and mentorship to start prototyping the change they want to see in their city," according to Five by Five, going on to state that "our most important criteria are curiosity, creativity, and a commitment to making a dent in the universe - even if it's just one city and one summer at a time."
During the fellowship, Corot, with guidance from numerous experts, will program several robots to spontaneously create chalk drawings, such as stars and hopscotch squares, on the streets of Paris to "to delight pedestrians" as part of her mission to "make the streets of Paris happy again," Borlongan told Mashable.
Corot will also receive personal help from the president of Thymio, the company that makes the robots she is learning with.
The ten-year-old plans to photograph the robots' work for an exhibition of the fellowship's outcomes at the Paris City Hall on 7 September, she wrote on her blog.
"It is my hope that your work on robotics will encourage more young girls all over the world - not just to code, but to be as brave as you, in asking for help and actively looking for different ways to learn and grow," Borlongan wrote in her letter to Corot.
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