Looking on the brighter side of the Ahmed Mohammed’s arrest

You,ve probably seen the #IStandWithAhmed  hash tag that has become a worldwide trending topic, after a 14-year-old boy, Ahmed Mohammed, from Texas was arrested for bringing in a homemade clock for a school project.

Mohamed, an engineering enthusiast, brought the clock to MacArthur high school in Irving and eagerly showed several teachers the clock and explained what it was, but he didn’t get the congratulations he was expecting. Instead, he left the school in handcuffs.

“I built the clock to impress my teacher, but when I showed it to her she thought it was a threat to her. It was really sad that she took a wrong impression of it.”

The teacher of the class who led to his arrest claimed that the clock, made by Ahmed Mohammed, looked like a bomb.

The student was then pulled from class and arrested by the local authorities, who claimed that the arrest had nothing to do with his ethnicity.

No other student’s project came under such criticism.

Since going viral, Ahmed has rightly received overwhelming support online and even caught the attention of Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg.

“Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed,” Mark said.

Another positive response came from the United States President Barak Obama who tweeted saying, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”

He also accepted an invitation to visit the White House on astronomy night next month.

Press secretary Josh Earnest said the Obama administration thought the boy was “failed” by his teachers and called the incident a “teachable moment”.

Young Mohamed’s story has drawn accusations of racism and Islam phobia and many scientists, technologists and members of the general public alike are expressing shock and outrage.

The ordeal reminds many of what a young woman named Kiera Wilmot endured in 2013.

Wilmot, also a budding scientist, was accused of lighting a chemical fire when one of her experiments went awry.

By the time criminal charges were dropped, she had already been expelled from her school. But on the brighter side, Wilmot was offered a trip to space camp by a NASA veteran.

School and city officials, however, insisted they made the right decision when they handcuffed, interrogated and arrested him this week.

He has since also received several other invitations to a Lifetime membership in Dallas electronics club, a scholarship to Space Camp (NASA Marshall), Computer Science and Artificial Intel lab tour (MIT CSAIL) and an offer to visit Facebbok, Telescope lab at UT Austin and the General Electric headquarters.

“This isn’t my first invention… and it isn’t my last invention!” Ahmed Mohamed affirmed.