I left my parents visiting the rest of Boston and I started to go alone around the MIT departments, trying to open every door that I found in front of me. 

While I was walking, I was looking through the laboratories windows and my attention was caught by an empty room -I mean with no humans inside 😀 ! –  full of duckies and with a sort of track for cars on the floor. 

What was this room about?  What was the purpose of these duckies?  I was very, very curious about it and had many questions, but there was no one in the lab! 

Obviously I never give up, I absolutely believe that nothing is impossible so, every day, until my departure to the next leg of our trip, I continued to go around MIT passing in front of THAT lab hoping to find someone in it. 

Finally one day I saw some people inside the lab doing something.  I was really excited!  I watched them from the window.  I absolutely wanted to know what they were doing – one of them was soldering, another one was using duct tape.  Suddenly they saw me and they invited into the lab!  What an astonishment for me! 

Immediately they asked me a lot of questions: why was a 14 year old roaming MIT alone, why was I so excited about that lab… Then one of them (I didn’t know his name) asked if I wanted to help build “Duckietown”.  He told me about the project (at that time it wasn’t started yet) and he asked me about myself and the first robot I built.  After an afternoon spent together, I discovered that this strange guy was Andrea Censi, one of the founders of the Duckietown project!  Amazing! 

Andrea proposed to me a challenge: I had to try to make my own Duckietown robot, a Duckiebot.  Since it was a university project, I was able to follow the online tutorials and ask lots of questions to all the other Duckietown members on the communication forum, Slack.  He had only one request of me: he told me that even though the robot was hard to build and program, I shouldn’t give up. 

I was so happy that I immediately agreed.  I was handed the robot kit, a list of various links and some Duckies . 

Now it was my turn!  I didn’t want to disappoint Andrea, so as soon as I arrived in Italy I put myself to work but, wow, building the Duckiebot was very hard!  I spent an entire afternoon trying to comprehend just 4 rows of the tutorial.  I began to ask questions on Slack and I tried, I tried and I tried again. 

I never worked with Linux before so that was a completely new world for me.  I started from the beginning, without knowledge at all but I worked for a few months until I received a message from Andrea: “Do you want to spend some time here, in Boston, working with us in Duckietown?”  Of course I was willing, I couldn’t wait, it was an amazing proposal! 

So I became a Duckietown Senior Tester at 15 years old and I spent almost all the summer inside the labs of MIT.  My task was simplifying the university-level tutorial and making it accessible to the high-school students (like me ) as well as making the Duckiebot, which had now evolved! 

Thanks to the help of Andrea and Liam (the other founder) I finally succeeded to program my robot: it was now able to drive autonomously in Duckietown.  If felt like a dream come true! 

Spending the summer in Duckietown at MIT allowed to me to discover a completely new world: I understood that education could be playful and that learning could be fun!