On the other hand, if your child wants to attend a US school for the different pedagogical approach, the opportunity to do research, the residential community concept, for personal growth, immersion into another culture… then you need to think differently than for IIT’s.
First, your child can stay in his/her current school, but in Standard 10 see whether s/he still wants to go abroad and see if s/he can switch to an IGCSE curriculum, as it’ll be more recognized abroad (US, UK, Canada…) which would be followed by IB or A-Levels.
As a Standard 6 student potentially preparing for education in the US, your child from standard 6-9 would be ecpected to have activities s/he does for fun outside of school, including the arts/music, sports, environmental club, volunteering… it can be anything and should be diverse. Then, in Standard 10 (or earlier if s/he’s especially gifted), s/he would start taking on leadership roles and gaining recognition.
Many students interested in engineering get involved in Robotics clubs. Some also compete with motorized legos and other such things, and/or make films with friends.
Beside engineering, there’s also the field of Computer Science, which is distinct from Engineering: more colleges offer CS and it’s a field with enormous potential (see: http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/about/a-different-way-of-thinking.html ; http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2016/06/northwestern-announces-plans-for-major-expansion-in-computer-science.html) Many students teach themselves how to program, either with Scratch or Minecraft, and keep building their skills, learning languages, programming, inventing apps…
There are 3,700 universities in the US, so even the top 370 are good, and there are easily 100 that are eccellent.
Some outstanding colleges for engineering, beside MIT, include Stanford, Harvey-Mudd, Olin, RPI, Norhwestern, Vanderbilt, plus many public universities such as UIUC, Purdue, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Penn State, Cal Poly SLO, UWA.