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He's the most prolific inventor in his West African village of Freetown, Sierra Leone

"The exceptional thing about Kelvin is he's a very poor kid with very little infrastructure. He's been able to harvest that talent with virtually nothing," said Laura Sampath, manager of MIT's International Development Initiative. "He takes apart and then learns by what he's seeing and can rebuild it, often better than what he's seen in the first place."

Sengeh and his team had 70 applications from 300 students, trying to solve some of Sierra Leone's most challenging issues.

I wanted to cry when I read about the recent widely publicized report from the Council of Great City Schools about the underachievement of African-American males in our schools. Its findings bear repeating: African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys; their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower; and black men represented just 5 percent of college students in 2008.

Driven by the intense focus on accountability, schools and teachers used standardized test scores to help identify and address student weaknesses. Over time, these deficits began to define far too many students so that all we saw were their deficits – particularly for African-American males. As a result, we began losing sight of these young boys’ gifts and, as a consequence, stifled their talents.

We need to shift from remediation focused on weaknesses to mediation that develops strengths.

Max had difficulty in preschool. He didn’t like circle time and left the group to read on his own. He didn’t like the other children touching him or his things. When they tried to look at his toys, Max would scream or hit them. He didn’t like to play with other children at all, and avoided any of the imaginative play going on in class. Instead, he stacked and sorted Lego pieces by color, size and shape. If other children wanted to play with Legos, he wouldn’t share. He did not know any of the other children’s names. Max had a lot of idiosyncrasies that were accommodated at home but were troublesome at school. For example, he didn’t like the color orange and resisted being near anything of that color.