VietNamNet Bridge – Neil Fraser, a Google software engineer, said Vietnamese
high school students have the informatics knowledge good enough to go through
the interview round at Google.
The engineer from one of the world’s biggest technology firms, during his visit
to Vietnam, spent his time to visit schools to find out how informatics are
taught in the country. He said what he witnessed there has really surprised him.
Vietnamese primary school students begin learning informatics when they enter
the second grade. The first lessons are the ones about the basic skills to use
computers, including the skills to preserve hard and soft disks.
When entering the third grade, students receive the lessons about Microsoft Word
and they have to fulfill really difficult typing exercises.
The interesting thing that the engineer has noted was that the small children
could learn how to type on a software product in English, which is not their
mother tongue.
He said he really was surprised when realizing that fourth and fifth graders
begin learning to program with Logo and they have to fulfill complicated
questions. Meanwhile, in the US, higher grades have to struggle to solve HTML
exercises, while Loops or Conditional form exercises are believed to be too
difficult for students to understand.
Having a strong impression with the informatics curricula followed by Vietnamese
schools, Neil expressed his willingness to give support to a school in Da Nang
City.
After realizing that the biggest problem of the school is the lack of the
teaching software products, he spent his holiday to write a software piece which
allows self-teaching and learning Loops and Conditional-form exercises more
effectively, called Blocky Maze.
And after realizing that Be Van Dan School lacks money to hire informatics
teachers, because of which only 50 percent of students can attend informatics
lessons, Nail donated $1,500 to the school which would be used to hire more
teachers the next year.
Nail also felt curious about the informatics knowledge of higher graders in
Vietnam, which prompted him to visit a high school without noticing in advance.
And he got so surprised when witnessing the students solving very difficult
Pascal exercises at a class.
After returning to the US, he consulted with senior officials of Google and
found out that these are among the 1/3 most difficult exercises to be given to
the candidates who want to apply for a job at Google.
Meanwhile, Vietnamese students only have 45 minutes to solve an exercise of this
kind, and most of them can fulfill the exercise.
In other words, 50 percent of the 11th graders can pass the interview ground to
get jobs at Google.
The US engineer said the informatics training at universities is not as good as
he expected. This could be one of the reasons behind the technology groups’
complaint about the lack of qualified workforce for the information technology
industry.
However, he said what he witnessed in Vietnam is really impressive. Vietnamese
students and teachers have higher eagerness for teaching and learning
informatics than American students. In the US, informatics teaching has not
received appropriate investments because of many problems, including the ones in
the educational system, training force and parents.
The software piece the US engineer wrote during his short holiday for the
primary school in Da Nang was mastered by the students just after 10 minutes of
introduction. This once again caused a big surprise to the US engineer.
Dan Viet