FAYETTEVILLE, Ark., Aug. 26 -- The University of Arkansas issued the following news release:
On a Chromebook screen in a Bentonville classroom, a cartoon panda blinks and waits.
It does not interrupt. It does not get tired.
When a child who stutters needs 10 seconds to finish a sentence, the panda listens first, then answers patiently.
Its name is Pico, and it was built by two teenagers who understood, better than most adults, why that patience matters.
For Sanjay Shreeyans Javangula, the why was personal. Growing up, he watched his cousin with autism whose stutter sometimes made it difficult for other children to understand him, and harder still to make friends. Javangula kept arriving at the same stubborn problem.
The only way his c...