CS in VN (2013) | Hacker News Reader

CS in VN (2013)

neil.fraser.name

47 pointsTomte10 comments

> There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process.

I am quite sure this is not an average case. He likely visited a high school olympiad team. Tbh, CS in Vietnam educational system is still treated like "third class citizen."

(I am Vietnamese, went to a gifted high school and had exposure with competitive programming)

I'm Vietnamese too and what he (the author) wrote here in this blog post seems very much the exception rather than the norm.

He most likely visited an Olympiad team, where they solve problems like these to compete. Most other schools, such as the ones I went to, had IT/CS as a side class (meaning they don't get that much attention from both students and teachers alike) rather than a main class (think Math, English, Vietnamese etc).

My friend is a highschool teacher and he is teaching 12 years old kids how to program with Scratch, playing with Arduino and Minecraft. And his school is just a normal school in a small town. AFAIK they are pushing IT and English to be most important subjects in school, a lot of schools I know are recruiting IT teachers. I am amazed at what 12 years old kids can do when they put their minds into it.

Some pictures from the school: https://imgur.com/a/yaeGDCo

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388535

> By grade 3 they are learning to how to use Microsoft Windows. Vietnam is a 100% Windows XP monoculture. Probably all with the same serial number. However, given that a copy of Windows costs one month's salary, it's easy to understand.

I wonder why Linux is not becoming more widespread in such places. Something like Xubuntu runs well on mediocre hardware and is completely free. Compared to such an old Windows like XP it also wins in terms of usability and software availability, not to mention security.

My guess is that it's simply a lack of awareness that this FOSS ecosystem exists.

Office suite is the biggest obstacle, all documents are in .doc or .docx, for both governments and businesses. Oh and the occasional breakage of Linux on desktop really hurts too. In early 2010 I volunteered to migrate IT system of a rural school to Ubuntu, it took us the whole morning to fix the KMS bug with Intel card, couldn't get resolution better than 640x480, before that 8.04 was famous with pulseaudio, 9.04 was IME's memory leak etc... yeah I know it's the driver's fault, not Linux, but it still hurts nonetheless.

Linked page is available on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20160310023438/http://bevandan.v...

Curious to hear what the consequences of the CS push were.

I was looking for a job in Vietnam in 2016. My impression was that there were a lot of big codeshops in Hanoi and Saigon writing outsourced code. There was also a not insignificant startup ecosystem, mostly using PHP.

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