This Young Woman Keeps Her Gloves On: Maria Estela Godinez

story and photo via Ricardo's Blog

The young woman in the pink shirt and gloves is Maria Estela Godinez.  She recently shared the stage with Intel Chairman, Craig R. Barrett, during his keynote at the Digital Leaders Forum as part of his Latin America trip.

Maria Estela Godinez is currently studying high school in her hometown San Francisco del Rincón, México.  She lives with her mother, a single parent, and five other siblings.  Her passion is electronics.  Ricardo tells her story on his blog:

Maria Estela built a glove that allows speech-challenged people to move their fingers in a similar fashion to Braille language and have those signals recognized by software that converts them into speech. She did it all by herself  (hardware and software) with the help of teachers and mentors. She did such a great job that she went on to win three awards this spring at ISEF, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair that Intel sponsors every year. Maria Estela won two awards for Computer Science (one in the individual category and another one in the overall category beating the winner in the group category) and won the IEEE award as well.

Maria Estela recalls how when they announced the winner in the first category, the announcer couldn’t quite pronounce the name of her town well. The person presenting the award said “San Francisco…” and hesitated to say “del Rincón”. In the mean time the San Francisco, California team began to scream and celebrate… only to hear her name as the winner.

She went on stage when Craig invited her up. The only truly familiar face in the crowd was her mother. She went on stage confidently and started to tell her story.  She told Craig about her project and demonstrated how the electronic glove works. As she made every move everybody was fascinated with her story. Colombia’s Minister of Communications began to cry in her front row seat; deeply touched, as most of us were. We were all listening to every word she said. When she was done, we all cheered her with a warm ovation.

BTW, Ricardo Carreon is a blogger living in South America and works for Intel.  He is interested in NGO activities, including youth leadership and education.  I follow his delicious tag stream and enjoy his flickr photos, particularly those depicting South American landscape and culture.

Official Intel Press Release here