Chapter 8 — Wind Village Robot Team

The warehouse behind the boarding kitchen had a musty smell typical of old paper left for a long time when Khanh Dan pushed the creaky wooden door open for the first time with the whole team. Inside were tables and chairs with broken legs, a few stacks of old textbooks with damp corners on the pages, a cracked blackboard propped against the wall, and on the ceiling, a corner of the corrugated iron roof let through a streak of afternoon sunlight, just as Teacher Toan had warned.

"Let's clean up first." Khanh Dan said, rolling up her sleeves. "The broken tables and chairs were carried to the corner of the backyard. Those that were still usable were left as desks."

The whole group started cleaning immediately, no one complained about the musty smell or the thick layer of dust clinging to every surface. Phong and Nam carried the tables and chairs, Gia Han cleaned, and Khanh Dan stood on a plastic chair with temporary electrical wire to connect an outlet from the kitchen, carefully checking each connection as Mr. Nghia had instructed about electrical safety.

Right from the first minutes, Khanh Dan felt that something was not going well between Nam and Gia Han. When Nam carried a table with a broken leg across to where Gia Han was cleaning the board, he let out a casual sentence, loud enough for the whole room to hear.

"Programming girls probably only know how to type, but can they even carry this table?"

Gia Han did not return immediately, her hand was still wiping the board, but her movements slowed down. "If you're good at carrying the table, then you can carry it, no one will stop you. But later if the pick-up arm you do doesn't follow the instructions I wrote, don't blame him for just standing still."

"Who said the handle needs complicated commands? Just a motor and belt to pull it, no need for your confusing lines of code." Nam responded, setting the table down a little harder than necessary.

"Then let me see how you can make a gripper using just a motor and a belt without needing to control the exact force of the gripper." Gia Han turned around completely, her eyes were no longer as reserved as usual, but turned colder. "Pick it too hard and it will break. Pick it too lightly and it will fall. That needs sensors, it needs programming, it's not just turning a screw and it's done."

"What about screws? Without screws, what does your frame run on? Does it fly?"

The atmosphere in the warehouse was slack, only the sound of the wind blowing through the hole in the corrugated iron roof. Phong stood silently in the corner of the room, still holding a broken table leg, clearly not wanting to interfere. Khanh Dan was about to speak up to negotiate, but she suddenly stopped and decided to let this situation play out for a few more seconds, wanting to see how far the two would handle themselves before she intervened.

"Okay, that's enough." She finally spoke, stepping between the two of them. "Both are half right, and both are forgetting the rest."

Nam and Gia Han both turned to look at her, still a bit hostile.

"Robots need both hardware and software to run." Khanh Dan spoke, her voice slow but steady. "The frame, the motor, the gripper - without good mechanics, no matter how well-written the commands are, they are just words on the screen and cannot be converted into real movements. But with good mechanics without precise control commands, the robot will just run around haphazardly, not doing anything useful. These two parts do not compete with each other, they must work together. No part is more important than the other."

No one responded immediately. Nam looked down at the table leg he was carrying, Gia Han looked down at the broom in his hand. Both seemed uncomfortable when being reminded in front of others, but no one objected.

"If you two want to argue about who is better, I won't stop you, just argue outside of class time." Khanh Dan added, her voice a little softer. "But in this team, each person is good at a different thing, so we need each other. If everyone is equally good, then you only need one person, there's no need to form a whole team."

At that moment, there was a timid knock on the door. The group turned around and saw a small girl standing in the door frame, clutching a sketchbook tightly to her chest like a shield, not daring to step inside.

"I... I'm Uyen Nhi, Miss Dan called me here." The girl spoke, her voice so soft that Khanh Dan had to lean over to hear clearly.

"Come in." Khanh Dan smiled and motioned for the girl to come in. Then she turned to explain to the remaining three people. "This is Uyen Nhi, class 7A. I happened to see your technical drawing notebook during a substitute lesson for Art last week, and I think our team is missing exactly what you're best at."

Uyen Nhi timidly opened the notebook, flipped to a page near the end, and showed it to the group. It was a detailed drawing of a water windmill — the kind still seen dotting the hillsides around the commune — but drawn with surprising precision for a thirteen-year-old: each bamboo slat was numbered, the angle of inclination of the blades was clearly marked, and there was even a small note in the corner of the page explaining how the rotating shaft transmitted force to the pump arm.

"I've been drawing my family's mill since fifth grade." Uyen Nhi spoke, her voice still small but less shaky when she saw everyone attentively looking at the drawing. "I like drawing machines, but I... I'm not good at speaking in front of the class, and I also don't know how to fix machines like my brothers and sisters."

"No need to know how to repair machines." Phong spoke up, picked up the drawing to look more closely, his eyes seemed truly convinced. "We're always making things at random. We can't fix anything if it's broken. No one has ever drawn such a clear design before making it. With this, we won't have to take it apart and reassemble it five or seven times."

Gia Han also nodded, picked up the notebook and flipped through a few more pages, her expression gradually relaxing from the anger she had felt with Nam. "Can you even draw a circuit diagram, the kind that draws symbols for connected components?"

"I... I've never drawn before, but I think I can learn." Uyen Nhi replied, her eyes brightened a bit.

Khanh Dan stood looking at all four children gathered around the sketchbook. The conflict between Nam and Gia Han seemed to temporarily subside before something new to pay attention to. She knew this was just the beginning, that clashes like before would certainly repeat themselves in many other forms in the coming months, but at least, right now, four children from four very different backgrounds were bowing their heads together on the same page, looking in the same direction.

"Alright." She clapped her hands twice, pulling everyone out of the notebook. "Let's clean up this place, then we'll have a meeting to divide the work. Uyen Nhi, you're in charge of redrawing the entire design every time we decide to do something new, okay?"

Uyen Nhi nodded, clutching the notebook tightly to her chest, and for the first time since entering the warehouse, a small smile appeared on her lips - not ostentatious, but enough for Khanh Dan to realize she had just found the right person for a piece of the puzzle that she hadn't even realized her team was missing.

During last week's substitute teaching session for Art class, Khanh Dan decided to teach the class for free, allowing students to draw freely while the main teacher was on sick leave. She walked around the classroom looking at paintings, mostly scenes of mountains and flowers drawn from her imagination, until she stopped behind a little girl sitting at the back of the class, bent over drawing not flowers but a machine - precise down to each screw, including notes in neat handwriting. Khanh Dan stood silently for nearly a minute before asking her name, and Uyen Nhi, at that time, blushed and tried to cover her notebook, thinking she had been caught doing something wrong because she did not draw the correct topic "hometown landscape" assigned by her Art teacher.

When the group finished cleaning the room, it was already dark, Khanh Dan lit another oil lamp borrowed from the kitchen because the only tube light in the warehouse was too weak, not bright enough for the whole corner of the room. Four children sat in a small circle on the swept cement floor, Khanh Dan sat in the middle, opening her notebook.

"The first thing we need to do is take inventory to see what we have on hand." she said. "We don't have to go buy it, because our team doesn't have the budget. We have to go find it — in our house, the neighbor's house, the pile of electronic waste, anywhere there are broken things that people don't need anymore."

"Like the mouse I fixed the other day?" Nam asked, his excitement had completely replaced his previous prickly attitude.

"That's right, but this time I'm looking for a clearer purpose." Khanh Dan nodded and wrote on a piece of paper taped to the cracked blackboard: motor, sensor, wire, circuit board, battery. "This weekend, each person goes in a different direction in the commune, recording or bringing back anything that falls into these five categories. Uyen Nhi, you can go with Phong, because you're not very familiar with the roads."

Uyen Nhi nodded repeatedly, seemingly relieved to not have to go alone. Gia Han looked at the list on the board, then looked at Nam, no longer with harsh eyes like in the afternoon, but with a new look of scrutiny, almost curious to see what this sassy boy would find.

"What about who finds the most?" Nam asked, clearly considering this a competition in his mind.

"No one wins, because all the items found are shared with one robot." Khanh Dan replied, putting the paper in her briefcase. "But if you find something good, I promise the whole team will admire you enough to satisfy you."

Nam burst out laughing, a much more comfortable laugh than in the afternoon, and even Gia Han, although still a bit stiff, couldn't help but smile slightly.