Programming Prodigy Arfa Karim Passes Away At 16

quantr writes "Arfa Karim, child prodigy, youngest certified Microsoft Professional in the world and winner of the president’s Pride of Performance, breathed her last breath on Saturday night at the Combined Military Hospital in Lahore. Arfa had an epileptic attack on December 22 and had been in a coma since."

Comments

Re:Certified Microsoft Professional

[billcopc]

Have you ever taken that certification exam ? Maybe then you wouldn't be so impressed.

One must also consider that not everyone is as dumb/irresponsible as the average North American kid. I grew up with other kids that would be considered "mature" by such standards, but really it was perfectly common and expected to learn things from your parents and uncles, instead of parking us in front of a TV. I had an uncle who was studing CS, so by age 2 I was writing my first Hello World program in BASIC. My neighbour was an EE, so naturally his kid was a whiz at electronics and robotics. By the time we hit 3rd grade, we would spend our evenings and weekends porting each other's computer games (he had a C64, I had an Atari).

Kids don't have any of the distractions and frustrations of us adults. If they are interested in something, they can easily invest 16 hours a day into that passion. They have no bills to pay, no spouses to patronize. Given the kind of harsh parenting seen in many 3rd world countries, I'm surprised we haven't heard of other kids getting an MS cert even earlier than 9. If a kid is bright enough, you could train them to pass the test by the time they're out of diapers - at the expense of their sanity of course.