A 14-year-old Texas student was arrested at school for building a clock

A ninth grader was arrested on Sept. 14 just outside Dallas, when he brought a homemade clock to school that teachers and authorities said looked like a bomb.

In the past, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed of Irving, Texas had built his own radio and been heavily involved in the robotics club in middle school, according to the $4.

When he started high school this year, he wanted to show off his technical prowess by bringing in a simple digital clock he built at home in about 20 minutes. It involved "a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front," $4.

But a teacher decided that the wires and circuits could only mean one thing.

"She was like, it looks like a bomb," Ahmed told the Morning News.

After the school called authorities, Ahmed was led off in handcuffs to juvenile detention under suspicion of creating a "$4."

"It looks like a movie bomb to me," Ahmed said one of the officers told him, even though all accounts say he never presented it as such. As a police spokesman $4: "We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb ... He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."

$4, a well-known technologist and entrepreneur, $4 what appears to be a picture of Ahmed being arrested at school wearing a NASA shirt:

Many people who grow up to be inventors and problem-solvers are tinkerers as kids. "If any of our early geek experiments had gotten the most terrifying response possible from teachers & police, would we have kept doing it?" Dash, who said he "used to take circuit boards & electronics to school," $4.

Importantly, a homemade clock is not even remotely close to a bomb. There are tons of DIY projects out there that teach you how to assemble a simple clock in just a few minutes, like this video below. A bomb would require much more research and dangerous materials - not just some wires and a tiny circuit.

As Wired put it in $4: "Maybe if enough young people make clocks, teachers and police will at least learn what a clock looks like, even on the inside."

Ahmed is suspended for now, and the investigation is ongoing. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is conducting its own investigation as to whether this is a case of Islamophobia.

"I think this wouldn't even be a question if his name wasn't Ahmed Mohamed," Alia Salem, the director of the North Texas chapter of CAIR $4.

Irving, a city where about a third of the population is foreign-born, has come under fire before for alleged Islamophobia. In March, the town's mayor $4 allegedly designed to protect against the "threat" of Shariah law, though it did not mention Muslims specifically.

As for Ahmed: "He just wants to invent good things for mankind," his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan, $4. "But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated."

Here's a video of Ahmed in his own words, also from the Morning News.