Google Blogger: Vietnamese HS Students Excelling At CS

An anonymous reader writes "A Google engineer visiting Vietnam discovered a large portion of Vietnamese high school students might be able to pass a Google interview. According to TFA (and his blog), students start learning computing as early as grade 2. According to the blogger and another senior engineer, about half of the students in an 11th grade class he visited would be able to make through their interview process. The blogger also mentioned U.S. school boards blocking computer science education. The link he posted backing up his claim goes to a Maryland Public Schools website describing No Child Left Behind technicalities. According to the link, computer science is not considered a core subject. While the blogger provided no substantial evidence of U.S. school boards blocking computer science education, he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag. According to the school's Wikipedia page, by California standards, Galileo seems to be one of the state's better secondary schools."

Comments

One data point...

[pongo000]

...does not prove anything.

he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag

OK, repeat after me: Computer science is not about programming/scripting languages. It is about the methodology and theory of developing programs, applications, and computational systems. To tell you the truth, I don't cover HTML in my computer science curriculum (and yes, Texas has a full-blown CS curriculum), mainly because CS isn't web development.

Re:HTML image tag? Really?

[anagama]

I think the the HTML reference comes from several links deep, not specifically, but topically:

Of the two classes described, neither teaches computer science. The first teaches keyboarding and use of Microsoft applications, while the second teaches website design. While the website design course claims to teach the use of "HTML programming code," this is a misuse of the term, as HTML is a markup language rather than a programming language and requires no understanding of algorithms or program design.

http://blog.carolynworks.com/?p=572

Which was summarized in the article like this:

Teachers often refuse to teach real CS because more often than not they don't understand it. Instead, they end up teaching word processing and website construction, while calling it CS.

http://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/

So essentially he's saying that US CS curriculum is so bad, students can't even do html, which actually isn't programming anyway, it's just a kind of text formatting.

fake, as always

[Anonymous Coward]

Vietnamese here, I have read that article a few days ago in my language. It is very likely that the school selected the best students in the whole school, put them in one 'class' for the test. It's commonly accepted here to do anything so you won't "lose face" and appear better than you really are. We have a proverb for that, "Show the beauty, hide the ugly".

Laughing at the Vietnamese ?

[Taco Cowboy]

You guys can laugh at the Vietnamese

Go ahead, have your laugh now

In Great Britain, they do have "computer classes" in their high schools. But do you know what they teach?

How to use Microsoft Words

How to make a Powerpoint Presentation

Re:Not blocking, just ignoring

[TitusC3v5]

I'm a generation behind you (I'm 29), but even when I graduated HS the curriculum had been trimmed down drastically. There were approximately two shop classes, three AP classes, and the rest was only the basic core stuff - a single foreign language (Spanish), biology, algebra, trig, geometry, typing/basic CIS, and a smattering of other subjects.

No psychology, no philosophy, no non-latin foreign languages, no math beyond pre-calculus (which was what we had labeled as AP Calculus), and even chemistry was missing from the curriculum. Granted, it's a school in a poor rural area, but there are a lot of poor rural areas in the US.

Words can't express how far behind I felt when I finally hit university, despite graduating at the top of my class in HS with the most difficult curriculum I was able to piece together from the meager offerings.

Education is heavily touted during election season, but unfortunately it's the first thing sent to the chopping block when budgets are tight.