越南高中生逆天了:一半可以通过谷歌面试

Google engineer Neil Fraser got a bit of a surprise when he visited Vietnam recently to see how schools teach ICT： kids in 11th grade are capable of passing the notoriously difficult Google interview process.

Fraser blogged about his trip， which ostensibly seems to have been a fact-finding mission involving him turning up unannounced at various primary and high school classes to see what the students are being taught.

Wandering into an 11th grade high school class he found kids were studying the following problem： Given a data file describing a maze with diagonal walls， count the number of enclosed areas， and measure the size of the largest one.

Suitably impressed， Fraser then asked a senior engineer back home how the question would rank on a Google interview. Here’s what emerged：

Without knowing the source of the question， he judged that this would be in the top third. The class had 45 minutes to design a solution and implement it in Pascal. Most of them finished， and a few just needed another five minutes. There is no question that half of the students in that 11th grade class could pass the Google interview process.

Vietnam exposes its kids early on to computers and programming， with schools， teachers， and parents apparently eager for them to learn in a way that isn’t mirrored in the US， or presumably the UK.

Fraser finds that computer classes start with the basics in Grade Two， by the following year students are learning how to use Windows XP―apparently ubiquitous in the country， while Grade Four sees them begin programming in Logo， starting with sequences of commands， then progressing to loops. By Grade Five they are “writing procedures containing loops”.

By comparison， at San Francisco’s magnet school for science and technology （Galileo Academy） 11th and 12th grade students struggle with HTML’s image tag， while loops and conditionals were “poorly understood”， and computer science homework is banned by the school board， said Fraser.

If nothing else， this snapshot into the Vietnamese school system shows what can be done despite limited funds.

谷歌工程师尼尔・弗雷泽在近期的一次越南之旅中被越南学校在信息通信技术方面的教学给震惊到了：越南11年级（高二）的学生有一半可以通过谷歌面试，而谷歌面试的测试题可是出了名的难。

弗雷泽在自己的博客中记录了这次越南之旅，而这更像是一次发现之旅。弗雷泽秘密到访了几所不同的越南中小学班级，研究其计算机科学课程是如何教学的。

当他慢步走进11年级的课堂，他发现学生正在解决的问题是：根据一个由斜面组成的迷宫地图数据文件，数出封闭区域的数量，以及计算出其中最大一个的面积。

让人吃惊的是，之后弗雷泽回家问了一位高级工程师，让他比较一下这道题目和其他的谷歌面试题的难度。结果如下：

在不知道题目来源的情况下，这位工程师认为越南学生的题目难度排在前三位。这道题目要求学生在45分钟内用Pascal语言完成，大多数学生完成了题目，只有一小部分学生需要多给5分钟时间来完成。毫无疑问，有一半的越南11年级中学生可以通过谷歌的面试流程。

越南让孩子很早就开始学习计算机和编程的课程，学校、老师、家长显然都希望用一种不同于美国或英国的教育方式来培养孩子。

弗雷泽发现，越南学生从2年级开始学习计算机基础知识，到3年级就学习如何使用Windows XP――显然是在全国普及，4年级学生学习编程的标识代码，从命令组再进步到循环结构，到5年级学生就要“编写包含循环结构的程序”。

与之相比，旧金山的科学技术磁石学校（伽利略科学院）的中学生的科技课程是这样的，11和12年级的学生还在学习HTML图像标记，而包含循环结构和条件结构的程序对学生们来说还是“难以理解”的，根据学校董事会的规定，学校禁止给学生布置计算机科学相关的家庭作业，弗雷泽这样说道。

如果只看这一点，越南教育体系的简介正在向我们展示如何在资源非常有限的情况下培养出优秀的计算机精英。