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